Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Encord
+ Equity + Bonus
More information about location
4-5 days a week in office
Data platform for AI training
Posted today
Data platform for AI training
101-200 employees
Posted today
+ Equity + Bonus
More information about location
4-5 days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To solve AI alignment by tackling the real bottleneck: data quality.
Role
Who you are
- A strong software engineer. You have solid fundamentals and the technical depth to design and build complex production systems
- A first-principles problem solver. You dig into the underlying problem, challenge assumptions, and make sound technical and product trade-offs rather than defaulting to the obvious solution
- A strong communicator and stakeholder partner. You can build trust, navigate competing priorities, and explain complex decisions clearly
- An autonomous builder. You operate with limited guidance, create structure from ambiguity, and drive problems through to production
- A versatile product engineer. You’re comfortable working across the stack and moving between hands-on engineering, product thinking, and conversations with the people using what you build
- 4+ years of software engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals
- Experience building production software across the stack, from product-facing applications and APIs to backend services and data workflows
- Strong system design judgment and experience making architecture decisions for complex software
- Strong coding skills in a modern language; Python is a plus
- Evidence of owning technical problems end to end, from design through production
- Strong product judgment, technical communication, and stakeholder management
- Experience working directly with users, customers, or external engineering teams is a plus
- Bonus: experience in a high-growth startup, developer platform, or ML/data product environment
What the job involves
- We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) to join our engineering team
- This is an engineering-first role: FDSEs are the technical owners who take the Encord platform into our most strategic and advanced customer environments, working directly with users and their engineering teams to understand complex problems, make system design decisions, and build production software that solves them
- As an early member of the Forward Deployed team, you'll have an outsized impact on shaping a critical engineering function at Encord
- You'll work hands-on across the stack, from APIs and data workflows to backend services and product surfaces, while owning technical problems end to end
- You'll make architecture decisions under real production constraints, debug complex integrations and workflows, and build solutions that can scale beyond a single customer or use case
- You'll operate autonomously, defining the right technical approach with limited guidance, building trusted relationships with users, and feeding what you learn directly back into the product and engineering roadmap
- Design and build production software for complex data, ML, and application environments
- Own system design decisions for deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, performance, and speed
- Work directly with customers and their engineering teams to understand ambiguous problems and define the right technical solution
- Build across the stack, from APIs and data workflows to backend systems and product-facing functionality
- Own deployments from technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and iteration
- Turn recurring customer problems into reusable tooling and product capabilities
- Debug complex production issues across reliability, performance, and data flow
- Communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Operate with high autonomy and own problems end to end
- Feed deployment insights back into Product and Engineering, and help shape the FDSE function as the team grows
Our take
It has become increasingly clear that the next generation of AI applications will be driven by data-centric approaches concentrated around training data creation, management, and evaluation. Crucial within this process is the annotation or 'labelling' of data. Traditionally, such annotation has been left to human workers, which has historically made this part of the process of AI development expensive, slow, and difficult to scale.
Encord offers a computer vision annotation platform that automates a number of manual labelling tasks. Its suite of tools is designed for collaboration across roles and teams, from domain-expert annotators to project managers and machine learning engineers. This allows companies to iterate 10x faster, and develop and deploy high performing models in less time whilst saving on annotation costs.
Demand is clearly there: since its launch in 2020, Encord has facilitated the annotation of more than 100 million frames and images and served customers in verticals such as medical imaging, smart cities, sports analytics and satellite imaging. Furthermore, usage is scaling rapidly, with the number of labels generated on the platform growing ~70% month-over-month.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2026
$60m
SERIES C
Aug 2024
$30m
SERIES B
Total funding: $107.2m
Company benefits
- Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
- Strong in-person culture: 3–5 days/week in our London, SF, and NYC offices
- Flexible PTO to fully recharge
- Annual learning & development budget
- Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe
- Bi-annual company offsites, twice-weekly team lunches, and monthly socials
- Company lunches twice a week
- Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage 🇺🇸
Company HQ
North Beach, San Francisco
Articles
Leadership
Eric Landau
(CEO)With MScs from Harvard and Stanford, Eric spent 8+ years as a senior quant at DRW deploying ML at scale—before co-founding Encord to make data the core of AI development.
Ulrik Stig Hansen
(President)Ulrik spent 3+ years in Sales & Trading at J.P. Morgan and holds science master’s degrees from UCL and Imperial—before co-founding Encord to transform how AI handles data.
Share this job
View 20 more jobs at Encord