Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

SalesPatriot builds an AI-native platform for aerospace, electronics, industrial and defense supply chains, aiming to replace fragmented processes with faster quoting, procurement and full visibility. As a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer you go to customers' sites, understand how they operate, configure the platform to fit their needs and lead the engineers on your accounts. The role is based in San Francisco and requires weekly travel; it is not remote.

Key responsibilities

• Travel to customers' operations on weekdays (Wisconsin, New York, Miami, Los Angeles) and regroup at the San Francisco headquarters on weekends to debrief and build.
• Map how each customer operates, from sales and supply chain teams to executives and CEOs, and identify the bottlenecks slowing growth.
• Configure automations in the SP Studio tooling so the platform reflects the customer's needs, and build trust in the product.
• Take full ownership of the customer's outcome, iteratively solving their biggest problems until SalesPatriot becomes the operating system of their business.
• Run the Forward Deployed Engineers on your accounts, set their priorities, review their work and prepare them to run implementations independently.

Required profile

• Experience owning customer-facing technical work and delivering results.
• Owns the account: sets technical direction with executives and IT, decides what gets built first, and says no to the wrong requests.
• Makes scoping and trade-off decisions on your own, without waiting for sign-off.
• Has mentored or managed engineers and is accountable for the FDEs on your accounts hitting their outcomes.
• Can earn the trust of procurement specialists while balancing executive priorities and IT constraints.
• Willing to travel every week and relocate full-time to San Francisco; co-living is interesting but not required.

Required skills

• Full-stack engineering: TypeScript, at least one frontend framework (React, Svelte, Next, etc.) and SQL, preferably Postgres.
• Ships production code every week.

The process is: call with an engineer, 1-hour technical test, call with the founder, flight to the San Francisco headquarters (paid by the company), then offer.