Forward Deployed Engineer
Posted yesterday
The role in short
Embed with civil engineering firms to identify high-leverage workflows and ship bespoke production software and integrations.
About Eagle
Eagle is on a mission to re-energize the engineering profession. Every road, bridge, and building starts at an engineering firm. There are 40K+ of them in the US, and most run on software older than the engineers using it.
This legacy toolset was designed before the term "user experience" ever existed and it's demotivating, error-prone, and slow. We're building the iron man suit for civil engineers to pull them out of this tedium and get them back to designing the future of our built environment.
Eagle was founded by Mayank Mardia (CEO), Sohum Daftary (President), and Thomas Shouler, P.E. (CTO), and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The opportunity
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you're the tip of the spear. You'll embed inside the firms we work with—sitting beside structural, civil, and MEP engineers who've often never worked with a software company—find the workflows where technology creates the most leverage, and ship tools that work in weeks, not quarters. You own the outcome, not a ticket. And after winning at the edge, you'll work with the rest of the team to compound what you learned into universal product leverage for Eagle. You get a front-row seat to building a company from zero on a problem domain that's barely been touched by AI.
What you'll do
- Embed on-site with engineers at the firms we work with—watch how they work, earn their trust, and find the highest-leverage problems to solve
- Sit with noisy, conflicting feedback from users and distill it into a clear opinion about what to build
- Own outcomes end-to-end: discovery, build, deployment, debugging in prod, and iterating live with the people using it
- Ship fast and bespoke when the deployment demands it—then feed every lesson back into a platform that compounds across firms
- Do whatever the deployment needs: wire up integrations to legacy Windows-native AEC software, write the scraper, or stand up an off-the-shelf tool to test an idea before you build the real thing
- Collaborate directly with the CTO on technical direction, engineering culture, and what we build next
Our Values
- Ask Why: We have a beginner’s mind, incessantly ask questions, and share our success with others. We always want to know what we can be doing better.
- Read the Room: We read the situation and meet people where they are, whether that's a counterparty, a client, or each other. We listen first and understand how our words and actions impact one another.
- Get on a Flight: We have dogged persistence. We operate with a sense of urgency with our work and careers, and we want to push and be pushed.
Technology
- Frontend: NextJS on Vercel, Tailwind CSS
- Backend: Kotlin for web services, Python for data
- Infra: Multitenant shared infra on AWS via Pulumi
Compensation
- Competitive cash compensation ($150K–$300K depending on experience)
- Founding equity, scaled to scope
Benefits
- Health Insurance: Full healthcare, medical and dental
- Retirement: 401(k)
- PTO: Flexible time off
- Travel: Company-paid
- Office: HQ in New York City
Process
Our process takes about 2 weeks: a conversation with Tom or Mayank, a second founder conversation, a 60 minute technical interview, followed by a work trial where you'll get to meet the rest of the team and build with us for a day.
Prep for this interview
2 questions likely to come up at Eagle, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Own outcomes end-to-end: discovery, build, deployment, debugging in prod, and iterating live with the people using it”
A customer says “we want AI in our claims process.” What do you ask in the first meeting?
How to answer
Why they ask: Most FDE work starts this vague. They want to hear you find the real problem before you pick a tool.
- Map the current process: who touches a claim, in what order, with which systems
- Find the slowest or most error-prone step and ask what it costs them
- Agree on one measurable goal (for example time per claim, or error rate)
- Ask what data you can access, and who signs off on security
Tip: Ask about the work, not the technology. Who does it today, how long it takes, what a mistake costs, and how they'd know it got better.
- 2Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Do whatever the deployment needs: wire up integrations to legacy Windows-native AEC software, write the scraper, or stand up an off-the-shelf tool to test an idea before you build the real thing”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
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