Forward Deployed Engineer, Wonderschool
Applied AI
Marketplace for child care
Be an early applicant
Marketplace for child care
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
101-200 employees
Company mission
To ensure every child has access to early education that helps them realize their potential.
Role
Who you are
- A builder and founder at heart—you’ve started a company, built products that got users, or made revenue independently
- Comfortable talking to users weekly and distilling insight into product decisions
- Technical enough to ship production code on your own—experience with Python, JavaScript, or similar languages
- Experienced using AI/LLMs and developer tools like Windsurf and Cursor to move faster and smarter
- Business-minded—you’ve worked in consulting, managed a P&L, or attended business school and know how to prioritize based on ROI
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and energized by a high-trust, high-impact, in-person environment
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Forward Deployed AI Engineer to lead product development on some of the most strategically important initiatives at Wonderschool
- You’ll spend your time working directly with customers (traveling as needed), uncovering pain points, and building AI-powered solutions that drive measurable impact across revenue, operational efficiency, and user experience
- You’ll act like a founder inside the company: identifying problems, shipping code, driving adoption, and iterating quickly based on what you learn
- This role blends engineering, product, operations, and business leadership—and is ideal for someone who has launched products, acquired users, and driven growth independently
- You will work closely with our sales, onboarding, and account management teams to automate workflows, build better customer experiences, and unlock new growth
- This role is inspired by best-in-class FDSEs at companies like Palantir and is perfect for builders who love solving real-world problems in the field, not from behind a desk
- Work directly with users and internal teams to identify high-leverage problems and ship product solutions
- Write production code (approximately 50% of your time) and ship weekly improvements across the customer journey
- Use tools like Widesurf, Cursor, and other AI accelerators to increase your velocity and quality of output
- Build and deploy AI-powered tooling that eliminates manual effort and improves the experience for providers, parents, and government partners
- Automate onboarding flows, proposal generation, reporting processes, and other operational workflows
- Own full loops: talk to users, design solutions, write code, test, deploy, and monitor adoption
- Prioritize based on business impact and collaborate across teams to drive measurable results
- What Success Looks Like:
- You uncover user pain points faster than anyone else and consistently ship solutions that address them
- You deploy AI-infused internal tools or product experiences that improve core metrics (conversion, retention, revenue)
- You fully own feedback loops—from discovery to deployment—and iterate rapidly
- Internal teams rely on your tools to operate faster and with fewer resources
- You’re moving fast, staying close to the customer, and operating with very little hand-holding
Our take
Wonderschool is a digital platform that enables parents and families to identify and connect with programs and preschools for infants and toddlers. The app has a huge database of potential providers, and uses intelligent software to identify the best child care and microschools for children.
This is an important service, as there are problems at both ends of the pipeline. Educators and carers are often paid insufficiently, while many parents struggle to find suitable education programs for their children. Wonderschool promises to solve those problems, while also providing a bespoke service that ensures that children get the care that they really require.
The childcare management platform has been instrumental in improving the quality and accessibility of care to children, as well as increasing the salaries of childcare professionals. It is fast-growing and can expect to continue this way following funding and partnerships.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-4% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jan 2022
$25m
SERIES B
Aug 2018
$20m
SERIES A
Total funding: $49.1m
Company benefits
- Flexible PTO: 10 paid holidays, one week company winter break between Christmas and New Years and quarterly mental health refresh days
- Wellness: Monthly gym membership stipend
- Remote: Hybrid work environment and stipend for new employees to set-up your home office and a monthly wifi stipend
- Health: Up to 100% coverage for employee premiums and up to 80% for dependents
- Parental leave: Parental leave for employees after 6 months of employment
- Autonomy: We prioritize health and wellness to ensure employees can produce their best work while achieving their personal and professional goals
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Chris Bennett
(CEO)Earned a BSc in Economics from UPenn Wharton School. Private Equity Associate at Heitman. Co-founder and CEO of Soldsie. Co-founded Wonderschool in 2016.
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