Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer @ Varick Agents

ABOUT VARICK:

Varick builds AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside the world's largest enterprises. Our forward-deployed engineers and strategists embed with client teams to map how work gets done and build POCs, then our engineers bring those agents into production. We're venture-backed, revenue-generating from day one, and already in production inside several of these companies. You'll join an elite team from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, and more.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

Forward Deployed Engineers are the client-facing builders at Varick. You embed with enterprise stakeholders ranging from C-suite to operators on the ground. You conduct interviews with process leads, deploy process mining agents across systems of record, and iterate on agent POCs together with the client.

This is a role for people who communicate clearly, think like operators, and build like engineers. You sit across the table from a controller and map how the process actually runs (not merely how the documentation says it does), then you turn that into specs, prototypes, evals, and working agents. You don't need to be a distributed-systems engineer. You need to know what to build, prove that it works, and land it with the client.

You also need to be the person to bring the stakeholders along. You will co-create KPIs with leadership, co-create UI surfaces with process owners, and plan and execute change management initiatives.

There is an enormous difference between building a demo and running agents inside a Fortune 500 team. This role lives in that difference.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

Embed with client teams across departments (from finance, sales, and IT to marketing, HR, and operations) to map how work gets done, step by step and system by system. Go beyond the golden path. Find the exceptions, the workarounds, and the impact of handoffs across teams for exception-handling

Translate ambiguous business problems into well-framed agent workflows with clear success criteria, guardrails, and an evaluation plan, using the latest Varick toolkits and process re-engineering solutions

Co-create KPIs with clients, identify ways to baseline them, and propose solutions for ongoing monitoring of post-deployment uplift

Drive adoption: train the client's team, sit with the users, watch what they actually do, and continuously iterate on the agents

Present findings, prototypes, and results directly to C-suite stakeholders. Top tier communication is a requirement for this role; simply being technical is not enough. If you don't have what it takes to command a room of the world's largest executives, you are not a good fit for this role

Codify what works into Varick's playbooks, skill files, and broader toolkit. Share field signal with our platform team: where the agents succeed, where they fail, what the model can't do yet, and what to build next

Build and leverage relationships with existing Varick clients to help them identify their biggest opportunities for additional AI transformation, whether that's more agentic initiatives within the same department or an expansion to a new department within the same org

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

The role combines 3 skillsets that are rare to find in 1 individual, and you need to be one of the best across all three: 1) Communication, 2) Analysis, and 3) Engineering. The list below highlights tactical examples of how you can show your experience across these.

A track record of solving hard, ambiguous problems for senior stakeholders and shipping the result, whether you got there as a SWE, product manager, consultant, banker, private equity investor, forward deployed engineer, or sales engineer. We care more about what you've built and owned than where you trained

AI-native. You use tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor every day; you've built with LLMs (prompt design, agents, evals), and you have a real point of view on what works and how to best use AI in your workflows. You can demonstrate this and argue well for your choices

Communication and client presence. You can hold a room of executives, push back on a controller without losing them, and tailor your depth to the audience. You communicate clearly and effectively, both async and sync, to any audience. You can explain topics at different altitude levels and switch between them effortlessly

Analytical with an extreme learning gradient. You have the rigor to put well-documented, well-researched answers in front of clients and colleagues. You pick up new topics almost instantly, whether a client is teaching you their workflow in an interview or a new technical advance demands you deepen what you know

Technical enough to build. You write Python or SQL comfortably, you've worked with APIs, you can read a data model and follow a trace, and you've shipped something real that people depended on: a product, an internal tool, a model, or an automation. You may have gotten there as an engineer, a technical PM, a sales engineer who built every demo, or a consultant or banker who taught yourself to ship agents on weekends

HELPFUL EXPERIENCE:

If you've mostly had technical roles but bring a proven communication and analytical edge, and working with C-suite stakeholders comes naturally to you:

Technical founder or early employee at a startup that sold into the enterprise

Technical Product Manager at a top-tier company

Forward Deployed Engineer or Implementation Engineer at a top-tier AI company

Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect at an enterprise software company

Senior SWE who wants to work closer to the customer and solve real problems in a compressed timeline

Data scientist or analytics lead who has worked directly with business stakeholders, owned a deliverable end to end, and shipped a model into a real workflow

Quant, trading, or research analyst from a top-tier firm

If you've mostly had non-technical roles but bring a technical understanding from other parts of your career or from your work on the side:

Product Manager at a top-tier company

Top-tier consulting, investment banking, or private equity

Deployment Strategist at a top-tier AI company

Founder or early employee at a startup that sold into the enterprise

Chief of Staff, BizOps, or corporate strategy at a high-growth company

CULTURE:

Extreme ownership. You own the tasks end-to-end, at an extreme level. You think beyond the task at hand, consider upstream and downstream impact, and are accountable for the entire outcome

An instinctual sense of urgency. You thrive in and help foster an environment with urgency. When a new request comes in, it is instinctually clear to you how that fits into the existing prioritization list. If it goes to the top of the list, you jump on it immediately, help the rest of the team realize the shift, and consider any impact of de-prioritizing other items

Low ego, high agency. We are all on this rocket ship together. If you win, the team wins and vice versa. You don't wait for permission to pursue a task. If you can do something that moves the needle, do it

Curious. Our work requires deep curiosity, both when it comes to understanding the clients' work and what matters to them, and when it comes to keeping up with and adopting the latest AI developments. Examples to showcase this could be pursuing niche interests, reading textbooks on the weekend, questioning the latest research, etc.

Perfectionist. You must be proud of your work product. In a client-facing business, it is critical that we put correct, well-informed, and well-documented material in front of the client. We are held to the highest standards and embody that mindset internally within Varick too

Startup mindset. Things are ambiguous. The hours are long. Weekend work is expected. And this excites you. With AI, the world is moving extremely quickly, and the ways of working ar