Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

OfferZen's client, Wonderful.ai is hiring for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join their growing team!

Wonderful.ai is a young start-up with $300M raised, and is now valued at $2B after 18 months of operations. They've grown to 600 employees across 32 countries, with an engineering team that includes people from Google, Palantir, Databricks, Microsoft, and Slack. They enable enterprises to build, test, deploy, and monitor AI agents for their most complex needs, serving customers and employees seamlessly across voice, chat, email, and back-office systems in any language or cultural context.

Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Wonderful, you’ll solve high-impact, real-world problems alongside enterprise customers and own work from first principles through production outcomes.

You’ll work directly with customers to understand critical workflows, design AI-driven solutions, and deploy agents that operate reliably in production. You’ll own projects end-to-end from problem definition and system design to launch and iteration - and be accountable for real business impact.

This is a hands on-generalist role for engineers who enjoy navigating ambiguity, learning quickly, and working across systems while partnering with enterprises as they become AI-driven organizations.

What You’ll Do

Partner with customers to understand operational challenges and success criteria

Translate open-ended problems into clear technical designs and implementations

Build AI agents that integrate with customer systems and perform real tasks

Own deployments, including reliability, performance, and continuous improvement

Test with real data, measure outcomes, and iterate based on results

Collaborate with Product & Engineering to ship high-quality solutions

Contribute to tools, documentation, and best practices that scale customer delivery

What We’re Looking For

5+ years of experience in software engineering or technical problem-solving roles

Strong fundamentals in software design, system thinking

Experience working across systems, integrations, and data flows

Comfort working directly with customers and owning ambiguous problems

Clear communication skills and a strong ownership mindset

Curiosity and interest in building AI-powered systems that work in practice

Nice to Have

Experience in forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or customer-facing roles

Exposure to AI agents, automation, or conversational systems

Experience operating and improving production systems

Logistics

Location: must be based in or willing to relocate to Johannesburg (office is in Rosebank)

Office attendance: ~4 days a week on-site, typically at a client's office, not Wonderful's own office

Citizenship/visa: no strict requirement to be SA citizen, but no visa sponsorship available — candidate must already have the right to work in SA

Compensation expectation: targeting 95th–99th percentile of local market rates - they’re willing to pay top of the range for talent, skill and experience

Pay structure: paid in ZAR, but employee can choose to anchor salary value to USD (converted at spot rate monthly) if they wish

If you're interested, please apply directly to this - we are recruiting on behalf of Wonderful and would need to run the interview process with you.