Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Title

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Location

Seoul, South Korea, on-site.

Company Description

The client is an early-stage AI startup headquartered in San Francisco, backed by Pear VC through its PearX accelerator. It builds an AI support agent that lives inside B2B web products. The agent sees the screen a user is stuck on, answers from the product's own documentation, walks the user through the steps on the live interface, and takes permitted actions like filing a ticket.

The client already works with enterprise customers, including a global revenue intelligence platform, a global research and advisory firm, and a 3D fashion design and collaboration platform. It was named a Representative Vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms. The agent runs in the cloud, in the customer's own cloud, or fully on-premise, including air-gapped environments. This is the client's founding forward-deployed role, based in Seoul.

What You'll Do

You take each customer from the first conversation to a product their people actually use. One person owns the whole path.

• Interview the customer's working teams and decision-makers. Map how their workflow runs today, where it breaks, and what success means to them.
• Turn that into a prioritized product and implementation spec, and a PoC plan with clear success criteria.
• Build the customer-specific prototype and integrations yourself. Debug the data flow between the agent and the customer's product.
• Run demos, interim decision meetings, and results presentations for customer executives and working teams, in Korean and English.
• Lead the rollout and the process changes that come with it, until the agent is in real use and measured against the success criteria.
• Take PoCs to production under enterprise constraints: security, permissions, compliance, and on-premise deployment.
• On a small team, fill the gaps: deployment, infrastructure, customer response. Bring what you learn in the field straight to the founders.

Required Qualifications

• Able to work full-time on-site in Seoul.
• You have owned a customer project end to end. You interviewed the users and decision-makers, turned their workflow, bottlenecks, and success criteria into a prioritized spec and a PoC plan, and then carried it through demo, rollout, and real usage. Collecting requirements or managing a timeline on its own does not count.
• You understand the API and data flows of web and B2B SaaS products, and you build customer-specific prototypes, integrations, and fixes yourself. You make the technical design calls and trade-offs rather than handing them to engineers. Deep ML research is not required.
• In at least one project, both halves are yours: the spec you wrote from the customer's problem, the thing you built, the stakeholders you aligned, and the deployment or adoption that followed. This is not a fit for engineers who stayed away from customers, or for product managers who never touched the build.
• Business-level Korean and English, including customer meetings.

Nice to Have

• You presented demos, interim decisions, and results to customer executives and working teams, managed resistance to new processes, and moved a real number: usage, handling time, revenue, conversion, or operational quality.
• You took a PoC to production under enterprise constraints such as security, permissions, compliance, or on-premise deployment.
• On a small team, you filled gaps beyond product features, such as deployment, infrastructure, or customer support, with work that shipped.
• You repeated the loop of customer discovery, spec, launch, and adoption at an early-stage startup or your own company.
• You led a project to production where downtime is expensive and stakeholders are many: payments, AI, enterprise software, on-premise, or system integration.
• You have run customer meetings, written technical documents, and presented in English.
• Hands-on work with LLMs, RAG, or agent systems.

Why Join

• You are the founding forward-deployed hire. How the client deploys in Korea, and what its customers remember, starts with you.
• You work with the founders every day. It is the closest view you can get of how an AI company finds its market, before you build one yourself.
• The agent already runs inside enterprise customers and is recognized by Gartner. The work is real deployments, not demos.