US Based Salary: $130,000 - $145,000 DOE
Job Summary
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will embed directly with organizations across the Democratic and Progressive ecosystem — including political campaigns, state and national parties, nonprofits, consulting agencies, and independent software vendors — to catalyze the adoption of agentic AI into their operations. You will serve as the bridge between NGP VAN’s platforms and the real-world workflows of these organizations, identifying where AI can create the greatest benefit, designing and building agentic skills that solve those problems, and deploying them. You will also contribute to the growth of NGP VAN Interface MCP solution and the underlying NGP VAN API, ensuring the platform can support an ever-expanding list of agentic use cases. This is a client-facing technical role that demands a combination of strong engineering instincts, genuine political and civic ecosystem fluency, and the interpersonal skills to earn trust with campaigns and organizers who may be encountering AI for the first time.
Essential Functions
- Embed on-site or remotely with client organizations (campaigns, parties, nonprofits, ISVs, consulting firms) to understand their existing workflows and identify high-value opportunities for agentic AI automation.
- Lead workflow discovery sessions with client stakeholders to map processes, surface pain points, and co-develop a prioritized roadmap of agentifiable workflows.
- Design and build agentic skills atop NGP VAN and the NGP VAN Interface, translating client workflow requirements into reliable, maintainable skill implementations that integrate with the broader Claude/AI agent ecosystem.
- Manage the full skill delivery lifecycle from requirements gathering through design, build, testing, deployment, and iteration — functioning as a one-person product and engineering team for each client engagement.
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor to client staff and leadership, communicating AI concepts accessibly, setting realistic expectations, and shepherding stakeholders through change management as they adopt new agentic tooling.
- Contribute features and enhancements to the NGP VAN Interface, NGP VAN’s MCP-based integration layer — to expand the set of NGP VAN capabilities available to agentic skill builders across the ecosystem.
- Expand the NGP VAN API identifying gaps in API coverage exposed through client deployments and contributing to API expansion efforts that unlock new categories of agentic use cases.
- Document skill designs, deployment patterns, and reusable components to build a shared library that accelerates future engagements and enables the broader NGP VAN engineering team to support clients at scale.
- Represent client needs internally by synthesizing field learnings into product feedback, roadmap input, and engineering priorities for the NGP VAN platform.
Knowledge, Skills & Abilities
KEY BEHAVIORS – THE “HOW”
- Exercise genuine curiosity and empathy with clients; ask before assuming, and design for the user in front of you, not an abstraction.
- Communicate technical concepts accessibly to non-technical political and nonprofit staff, meeting clients where they are.
- Take end-to-end ownership of client engagements: proactively identify blockers, surface risks early, and follow through on commitments.
- Balance speed-to-value with engineering discipline; ship working skills quickly, and build them to last.
OUTCOME EXPECTATIONS – THE “IMPACT”
- Organizations in the Democratic and Progressive ecosystem adopt agentic AI workflows that meaningfully increase their operational capacity and ability to win
- A growing library of reusable NGP VAN agentic skills accelerates deployment timelines for future client engagements.
- Field learnings from client deployments directly shape the evolution of the NGP VAN Interface and NGP VAN API, making the platform more agentic-ready over time.
- Bonterra is recognized as the catalyst for AI adoption across the progressive tech ecosystem.
Required Minimum Qualifications
- 3–5 years of professional software engineering or product management experience, with demonstrated ability to build and ship production-quality software independently.
- Experience building with LLM APIs, agentic frameworks, and/or MCP-based tooling, including designing and implementing skills, tools, or agents that automate real workflows.
- Proficiency in back-end or full-stack development using technologies such as Python, Node.js, or .NET; comfort working across the stack as client engagements demand.
- Strong REST API fluency, both consuming APIs (such as NGP VAN’s) and designing new endpoints.
- Client-facing experience: able to run discovery sessions, manage stakeholder expectations, and translate messy real-world requirements into clean technical specifications.
- The ability to work autonomously in an embedded or forward-deployed model with limited day-to-day management oversight.
- Familiarity with Democratic campaigns, progressive nonprofits, and/or political technology; you should understand the ecosystem you're deploying into.
- Ability and willingness to travel on-site to meet with customer organizations
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience with NGP VAN or EveryAction products and familiarity with the broader progressive tech ecosystem
- Prior work as a forward-deployed engineer, solutions engineer, or technical implementation consultant.
- Product management experience or training
- Experience building MCP servers, Claude skills, or similar LLM tool integrations.
- Campaign, party, or political nonprofit staff experience (you've lived the workflows you're automating)
This position is part of a bargaining unit represented by CWA Local 1400, 2336 or 13000.
At this time, we are unable to consider candidates who require current or future sponsorship for employment authorization.
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