Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Atomic · USA
About this role
## Founding Forward Deployed Engineer ### About the company We’re a stealth holding company acquiring and operating software businesses in overlooked, mission-critical industries—the systems that run the physical economy but have been ignored by Silicon Valley. We’re rebuilding them as **AI-native from the inside out**. Small, well-capitalized, and moving fast—**this is a build shop with real customers, real revenue, and real P&Ls**. ### The role You’ll be the AI engineer and will **own**: - Building an **industry-specific GPT** (reasoning layer encoding domain expertise for each vertical) - Embedding **AI-native functionality** directly into our **AI-native system of record** (not bolt-on chatbots) - **Core workflow replacement** and the **agents** that do the work - Moving legacy **system-of-record datasets** into new **AI-native** ones - Making it repeatable: every new portfolio company benefits from your **playbook, model stack, eval harness, and infra** - Managing AI talent across operating companies (player-coach for AI engineers embedded at each sub) **Split:** 90% building / 10% managing ### What you’ll do - Ship a working **domain-specific agent** into a live customer environment in your first **30 days** - Build **evaluation infrastructure** to measure whether agents truly replace human workflows (not vibes) - Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier + open models based on the economics of each vertical - Sit with customers, watch workflows, instrument them, and rebuild them - Write the **AI engineering playbook** future portfolio companies inherit on day one ### Who you are - A **builder first**: you’ve shipped things people actually use - A forward-deployed engineer who can **fly to customer sites**, understand the business, and then write code - A strong technical lead (alone or as the clear lead) - You can defend your approach with numbers: fine-tune vs. prompt vs. RAG vs. agent vs. harness - You’ve built with the current frontier stack (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open models) in **production** - Comfortable with ambiguity, small teams, and unglamorous industries - You’re allergic to slide decks ### What this role is not - A research role — **we ship** - A management role — **you build** - A “Head of AI” title — you’ll be in the codebase daily - A place for process/roadmaps handed to you or a 20-person team to feel productive ### Equal opportunity Atomic is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics, or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local law. Please review our CCPA policies here.
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