Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

What you'll own

• Customer deployments end to end. You own the kickoff, the discovery, the technical design, the build, the launch, and the first weeks of usage. A deployment is yours from week one to working product.
• Data engineering. Map the customer's data, build the pipelines, normalize messy schemas across SIS, LMS, CRM, advancement, and finance systems. You handle missing fields, deduping, write-backs, syncs, and the long tail of edge cases that always show up in real institutions.
• Backend services. Build the APIs and integrations that sit between the customer's systems and our agents. Production code that runs reliably inside real institutions.
• Frontend work. Ship the dashboard the dean actually opens. Build the interfaces the advisors actually use. Customer-facing UI is part of the deployment, and you build it.
• Last-mile agents and workflows. Configure and customize agents for each customer's actual workflow. Tune prompts, define tools, set guardrails, wire up the workflows that match how this specific institution operates. Generic agents lose; customer-specific agents win.
• Launching with the customer. You run the go-live. Cutover plans, dry runs, rollback plans, sitting next to the customer on launch day. When something breaks at 7am, you diagnose, prototype, and ship. Sometimes within hours.
• Training the customer. Build the runbooks, train the end users, walk advisors and admins through the product, capture feedback in real time. A deployment is only successful when the customer can use it without you in the room.
• Feeding the platform. When you see the same customer-specific problem twice, you push it back to the platform team with the right framing so the third customer never has to wait.

Who you are

A full-stack builder who actually likes customers. The kind of engineer who can sit in a working session with a dean and walk out knowing exactly what to ship by Friday.

• Strong across the stack. TypeScript, Python, React, Node, SQL. You debug a data pipeline, ship a frontend tweak, and design an API in the same day.
• Fluent with data. Real institutional data is messy, partial, and inconsistent. You map it, clean it, reconcile it, and turn it into something the agents can use.
• A shipper. A working version this week beats a perfect version next month. You move at the pace of the customer conversation and close loops fast.
• Customer-fluent. You translate institutional pain into code, and code back into something the customer trusts.
• AI-native. You orchestrate Claude Code agents alongside your own work. You have a real point of view on where agents add leverage and where humans still have to drive.

What it's like to work here

Risely is a startup in the truest sense. We are all in. The pace is intense and the work is demanding, and the impact is real.

• In-person commitment. We're in the office together. Building at this stage takes full presence and full focus, and that often means evenings and the occasional Saturday.
• Speed and impact. Your work ships fast and reaches students and staff in days, not quarters.
• Mission clarity. Every line of code, every late night, every customer trip ties back to one purpose: helping students stay enrolled and helping colleges survive a generational shift.
• Ownership from week one. You'll make critical decisions and drive real outcomes from the start.
• Deep, meaningful work. You'll wrestle with data complexity, privacy regulations, and decades-old legacy systems. The problems are hard, and solving them changes how universities run.

About Risely

Compensation

$120-180K plus founding-level equity.