Forward Deployed Engineer
Posted 2 days ago
The role in short
Embed with media and entertainment clients to discover needs and build full-stack AI-driven production systems.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Triptych is the new entertainment infrastructure. The company runs three integrated business units: talent management for a roster of artists, actors, and creators; a digital marketing agency built on AI-driven distribution and content systems; and a media division creating original IP and brand-funded work. Across its clients, Triptych works with Emmy Award-winning actors, New York Times best-selling authors, Grammy-nominated artists, and unicorn startups. Prioritizing creative innovation and technological development, we're building the modern entertainment company.
Triptych recently raised $1.8M in pre-seed funding from top music, media, and entertainment executives and investors to support our revenue and team growth. Our team of 10 works in person out of our Tribeca office.
THE ROLE
Triptych is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to bring our technology and strategies to companies across the media and entertainment landscape. You'll embed with labels, publishers, studios, and media companies, learn how their teams actually work, and build systems that make that work faster, cheaper, or newly possible. Then you'll bring what you learned home and build for us too.
We're looking for someone who thinks about technology in a creative way and brings that thinking to the issues our clients face.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Lead discovery with client teams, from executives to the people doing the work, and turn ambiguous problems into scoped builds
- Ship full-stack systems inside client environments, balancing scope, speed, and quality, while managing client expectations
- Keep clients and internal teams aligned through clear writing, regular updates, and consistent follow-through
- Report back to Triptych's product and strategy teams: what worked, what broke, and what we should build next
- Build internal tools for Triptych's own teams with the same approach
WHO YOU ARE
- 3+ years writing production software, ideally in a client-facing, consulting, forward-deployed, or early-stage startup role
- Fluent across frontend and backend in Python and TypeScript/JavaScript
- You've shipped products built on LLMs or generative models and understand how model behavior shapes the product (latency, cost, failure modes, evals)
- A systems thinker, equally comfortable designing the architecture and building every component of it
- A curious tinkerer that stays constantly informed. When a new model drops, you've tried it within the week and have an opinion about what it unlocks
- You can explain a technical trade-off to a label executive in 2 minutes, write a scoping doc a client signs off on, and push back when a request won't solve the real problem
- Bachelor's in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Bonus points if:
- You love music, film, or creator culture and understand how media companies operate and make money
- Have hands-on experience with image, video, or audio generative models, both closed (Veo, Kling, Seedance) and open source (Stable Diffusion, Flux, ComfyUI), and chaining them into working pipelines
- Have agents autonomously supporting your personal and professional life
DETAILS
- Location: New York City, in person in Tribeca, with occasional on-site time at client offices as needed
- Type: Full-time
- Compensation: $130,000 - 180,000 base + equity
TO APPLY
Email hiring@triptychmgmt.com with:
Your resume
GitHub, portfolio, or links to things you've built
Pay: $130,000.00 - $180,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
Work Location: In person
Prep for this interview
3 questions likely to come up at Triptych Management, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “You've shipped products built on LLMs or generative models and understand how model behavior shapes the product (latency, cost, failure modes, evals)”
How do you know an LLM feature is good enough to ship?
How to answer
Why they ask: Evals are what separate a demo from production. Many roles list them by name.
- Write 50–200 real examples with expected outcomes, with customer experts
- Agree on a pass bar and the errors that are never acceptable
- Score automatically where possible; review a sample by hand
- Re-run on every prompt or model change, and watch live traffic after launch
Tip: Describe a test set built with the customer, a pass bar agreed up front, and checks that run on every change.
- 2Coding
They wrote: “Fluent across frontend and backend in Python and TypeScript/JavaScript”
Here's a CSV export from a customer. Write a script that cleans it and loads it into our API.
How to answer
Why they ask: Very close to real FDE work. They watch how you handle bad rows and failures.
- Read with a proper CSV parser; check the header first
- Validate each row and collect errors, not crash on the first one
- Send in batches with retries and a clear report at the end
- Write one or two quick tests for the parsing
Tip: Talk through edge cases out loud: encodings, missing fields, duplicates, rate limits.
- 3Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Lead discovery with client teams, from executives to the people doing the work, and turn ambiguous problems into scoped builds”
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.
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