Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

• Partner with the GM and early customers to define technical requirements for new business verticals
• Build the first MVP of reusable patterns, integrations, and tooling to establish a technical foundation
• Lead customer engagements from technical scoping through delivery and post-launch support
• Make architectural decisions regarding what should be built as vertical-specific tooling versus core platform capabilities
• Translate messy customer requirements into durable, maintainable, and scalable systems
• Identify repeatable use cases and infrastructure gaps to help drive productization

Requirements

• 3+ years of engineering experience, including 0 to 1 startup experience in highly ambiguous environments
• Strong engineering generalist instincts with a backend and data orientation
• Proficiency in Python and SQL
• Ability to work across infrastructure, application logic, and data systems
• Strong technical judgment regarding the balance between short-term delivery and long-term architecture
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for interacting with senior stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience as a founding engineer at a successful startup
• Experience extending an existing platform into new domains or use cases
• Track record of turning bespoke customer work into reusable internal infrastructure
• Familiarity with ML, NLP, or LLM-based systems

About the Company

Protege is building the solution to AI's biggest unmet need: access to high-quality training data. Our platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data. We are a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders obsessed with velocity and impact, backed by world-class investors.