Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About the role
Founding forward deployed engineer role at Nessie, a YC-backed startup. You deploy Nessie into customer environments, build integrations, manage onboarding and troubleshooting, and contribute across the stack with autonomy in a two-person team.
Responsibilities
- Ingestion at scale: build data lake for heterogeneous sources and ensure raw data is captured without upfront lossy summarization.
- Ontology management: live state of a company with derived fields, conflict resolution, and authority to keep data current.
- Self-improving agents: enable skills as units of improvement, synchronize across Codex and Claude Code, analyze invocations and failures, and propose edits.
- Search and retrieval: enable rapid querying across thousands of sessions and documents, locally and in the cloud.
- Human-AI coordination: manage team sharing, permissions, and policy with hierarchical sharing models.
- Agent-facing surfaces: CLI, MCP, and plugins for major harnesses to reach accumulated reasoning.
- Enterprise readiness: support self-hosted/on-prem deployments and SOC 2 compliance.
- Forward deployment: embed with customers, handle onboarding, integrations, and live troubleshooting; shadow founders as relationship leads.
- Own customer feedback loop: triage, reproduce, drive fixes, and ensure nothing slips.
- Build integrations to meet customer needs and re-package into product.
- Absorb operational work to maintain shipping velocity.
- Broad role beyond coding: contribute to internal ops and customer relations when needed.
Qualifications
- 1+ years experience in engineering roles
Skills
Benefits
- Salary: $100K-150K
- Equity: 0.5%-1.0%
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Three to four weeks of PTO per year
- Lunch and dinner in the office (Mon-Sat)
- Commuter benefits
- Relocation support to San Francisco
- Founders closely involved in day-to-day work
- Sponsorship for work authorization (including H-1B) for the right person
About Nessie
Shareable AI Brains for Everyone
Nessie is building personal AI brains that augment human cognition. Nessie turns your scattered AI conversations and documents into a shareable AI brain you actually own. It's a thinking partner that lets you instantly search your entire history of ideas, synthesize them into new insights, and watch your knowledge build on itself over time. Right now, your best thinking is trapped in ephemeral AI chat histories. Nessie unifies your context from ChatGPT, Claude, and (soon) Apple Notes/Google Docs/Notion/other context sources, auto-organizing the mess into an AI-enhanced brain. Next, we are unlocking sharing. Instead of sending a static doc, you will be able to send your "Product Strategy Brain" to a cofounder, or publish your "Research Brain" for your entire team to chat with. Who it's for: AI-native thinkers—founders, researchers, and writers—who believe their best ideas should compound. The Team: We are two Yale CS grads and former Amazon engineers building the tool we needed for ourselves. We combine Anna's obsession with neuroscience and augmenting human cognition with Tiger's lifelong passion for building products (he shipped an app with 70k+ users at age 13). Traction: Launched 3 weeks ago. We have over 1,200 users who have imported 300,000+ AI conversations into Nessie. 30% week-over-week organic user growth. Origin Story: Nessie was born after we hit the 1-million-token limit in multiple Gemini chats. Overnight, months of research disappeared. We realized the problem wasn't just about storage; it was that the medium for AI-native thought didn't exist yet. The chat window is a place to ask questions, not a place to build a mind. Our Vision: We are building a new medium for personal intelligence. Everyone will have an AI brain on Nessie. You will use it to think better, remember more, and share your mind with the world.
More open roles at Nessie
- Founding Engineer3mo agoHybrid (San Francisco, CA) · Engineering