Forward Engineer

About the Role

As a Forward Engineer at Metis, you’ll be part of a tight-knit, product-driven team leveraging our training platform to deliver outcomes for customers. You’ll work across the stack, from low-level systems to user-facing features, to deliver resilient, high-performance products that power mission-critical AI workflows. You’ll own projects end-to-end, collaborate deeply with platform, research, and customers to make pragmatic technical decisions that tie directly to customer outcomes.

We move fast, but we hold a very high bar for correctness, maintainability, and simplicity. You’ll be expected to write production-grade code, reason holistically about systems, and push the boundaries of what’s possible in applied AI engineering.

What You'll Do

Translate research prototypes into production systems that enterprises and labs can reliably adopt

Collaborate with platform, product and research teams to ship features under real customer constraints

Write clean, testable code in modern languages while leveraging AI tools to accelerate development

Debug complex systems, identify bottlenecks, and drive performance, security, and reliability improvements

Requirements

Strong fundamentals in at least one modern language (Python, Go, Rust, etc.)

Experience with backend systems, distributed computing, or high-volume services

Strong communication abilities with a high bar for customer interaction

Ability to turn ambiguous product asks into simple, pragmatic solutions

Familiarity with system design, software engineering best practices, and debugging in production environments

Comfortable working across the stack — from APIs and orchestration to user-facing surfaces

Compensation & Benefits

Base: $150,000–$450,000

Significant Equity

Full medical, dental, and vision

Wellness & L&D stipend

Equinox membership

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided (Unlimited Doordash)

$25,000 housing stipend

About Metis

Metis helps enterprises and labs build the most reliable AI agents by leveraging post-training. Our platform enables the creation, improvement, and deployment of the most capable frontier agents designed for rigorous, real-world workflows.

Momentum

0 → six-figure monthly revenue in the last six weeks

Working with several Fortune 500 enterprises & frontier AI labs

Growing 150%+ MoM

Backed by

Y Combinator, CRV, and executives from OpenAI, Google, Mercor, NVIDIA, and others.