Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Encord
Plus commission, and meaningful equity
4-5 days a week in office (North Beach, NY)
Data platform for AI training
Open for applications
Data platform for AI training
101-200 employees
Open for applications
Plus commission, and meaningful equity
4-5 days a week in office (North Beach, NY)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To solve AI alignment by tackling the real bottleneck: data quality.
Role
Who you are
- A strong software engineer with excellent system design instincts and a track record of shipping high-quality code, frequently and reliably
- An excellent problem-solver who can take an ambiguous customer situation, break it down, and design a technical solution from scratch
- A great communicator who is motivated by building customer relationships and solving customer problems
- Entrepreneurial and autonomous mind, energized by ambiguity and competing technical priorities, and able to manage client relationships and technical delivery without close supervision
- Ambitious and hardworking, with a track record of top-percentile performance in whatever environment you've been in, whether engineering, academia, business, or sport
- 3–8 years in a software engineering role; Python is a big plus
- Experience building or working with data integrations and APIs
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without being told what to do
- Prior experience at a high-growth startup is a plus
What the job involves
- We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) to join our product 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 clients' engineering teams to identify problems and design, build, and ship the solutions that solve them
- As an early member of the Forward Deployed team, you'll have an outsized impact on shaping a critical function for Encord and our customers, in a role that combines hands-on engineering with direct client ownership
- You’ll do tough system design calls under real customer load, and customers will trust you to get their hardest integration and workflow problems actually solved
- You’ll operate autonomously, defining your own path to a solution, managing client relationships directly, and feeding what you learn straight back into the product roadmap
- As an end-to-end owner of the deployment process, you will work across a variety of problems: technical engineering, operational excellence, and strategic product work. Expect to build data integrations, guide customers with best practices, demo the product, and contribute to the product roadmap
- Design and ship high-quality, production-grade code that integrates Encord into customers' most complex data and ML pipelines
- Own system design decisions for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, and speed
- Work directly with clients' engineering teams to diagnose problems, scope solutions, and ship fixes end-to-end
- Build data integrations and technical solutions that support customer onboarding, adoption, and scale at pace
- Communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to both engineering counterparts and non-technical stakeholders
- Operate with a high degree of autonomy: identify the right problem to solve, decide how to solve it, and see it through with minimal oversight
- Collaborate with product and engineering to feed customer insights back into the roadmap
- Help define and scale the Forward Deployed function as an early team member
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.
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