Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, Planhat
Customer success software
Open for applications
Customer success software
201-500 employees
Open for applications
201-500 employees
Company mission
To help technology companies build their business and make their customers more successful.
Role
Who you are
- 2–4 years of experience in consulting, data engineering, software engineering, or similar technical roles
- Comfort working directly with customers and operating in ambiguous environments
- Curiosity, ownership, and interest in building something new
- Willingness to travel to customer sites
- The most important trait is the ability to learn fast
- Strong foundation in SQL and data modeling
- Experience with Python and/or other scripting languages
- Experience integrating with APIs (REST / GraphQL)
- Familiarity with data pipelines, ETL / ELT, or workflow automation (bonus, not required)
What the job involves
- Solve the hardest problem in applied AI
- Before, the hard part was building enterprise software
- Today, the real challenge is delivering outcomes in environments where customer data is scattered, inconsistent, and locked inside tools that don’t talk to each other
- Where AI initiatives fail not because the models are weak, but because organizations lack AI data readiness: the ability to turn messy, chaotic customer data into clean, structured fuel that AI systems can actually trust
- And where commercial teams are expected to bridge that gap themselves, without the orchestration, collaboration, or technical depth required to make it work at scale
- Today, commercial teams don’t have the orchestration, collaboration, or technical depth to bridge this gap on their own
- This is the inaccessible problem: turning real-world complexity into scalable, repeatable AI-powered outcomes
- Planhat’s AI Deployment Program (ADP) team works directly with modern, high-velocity companies that want to be at the frontier of applied AI. We deploy, refine, and scale AI capabilities inside real commercial organizations and not in theory, not in slides, but in production
- And Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are the heart of it. Joining Planhat as a Founding FDE at this moment is a unique professional accelerant with the possibility to:
- Work with companies that are early adopters of AI and want to build the future with us
- Gain experience in data engineering, systems design, AI deployment, workflow automation, and commercial operations - all at once
- Become fluent in applied AI: not model research, but the much harder, much rarer skill of deploying AI that actually works
- Develop technical intuition that is extremely rare in the market, the type that opens doors to engineering leadership, product architecture, or applied AI roles in any industry
- Shape a brand-new discipline. FDE is to this decade what full-stack engineering was to the previous one
- Planhat has years of hands-on experience working with some of the most data-rich, cutting-edge commercial teams in the world
- The ADP team is early-stage, high-trust, and has the autonomy to shape its own roadmap and operating model
- Apart from foundational AI research, we believe the FDE role is the hardest and most important problem in AI right now. You’re building the frontier of applied AI. Not watching it from the sidelines
- As our Founding FDE, you’ll embed with customers, understand how their business and systems actually work, and engineer the data pipelines, workflows, and automations that make AI useful and valuable
- This isn’t traditional consulting. And it’s not back-office engineering. It’s applied problem-solving in the real world, where your decisions directly impact, revenue, retention, and business outcomes
Our take
Although acquiring customers is essential for the initial growth of a company, long-term sustainable growth comes from maximising the lifetime value of existing customers. To help with this, Planhat provides a customer platform that lets clients analyse insights regarding their target audience, as well as manage workflows and drive customer experience.
Planhat distinguishes itself from other customer success software like Salesforce and Totango through its rapid deployment and easy adoption. The platform provides a range of solutions, from customisable customer health scores to management reporting and CSM team performance. It's been taken up by thousands of teams globally and its corporate customers include the likes of Consensys, Alation and Adenza.
Initially a bootstrapped company, Planhat had already built a significant business by the time it closed its first investment round in 2022. With this support, the company has focussed on scaling both its commercial and R&D functions, further developing the product and growing the business.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
32% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Apr 2022
$50m
SERIES A
Total funding: $50m
Company HQ
Eastern Malibu, Malibu, CA
Leadership
Niklas Skog
(Co-Founder & Product & Engineering)Previously a Management Consultant at McKinsey & Company, a Product Manager at Meltwater Group, a Managing Director at Jobylon and COO at GlobeSoft.
Kaveh Rostampor
(Co-Founder & CEO)They are a co-founder and Board Member at Jobylon. Former Executive Director at Meltwater. Chairman of the Board and Board member of multiple global SaaS companies.
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