Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding Customer Engineer)

Clera

$140K — $185K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 0-3 years in a customer-facing technical role in SaaS.
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills for product demos.
  • Hands-on experience in building automation workflows (scripting, APIs, low-code/no-code tools).
  • Ability to analyze customer feedback and conversation logs for insights.
  • Skilled in cross-functional collaboration to translate customer needs into product features.
  • Experience coaching AI agents for sales contexts is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Own customer relationships from onboarding to ongoing success.
  • Teach AI agents about product positioning and sales workflows.
  • Analyze conversation logs to provide insights to the product team.
  • Translate customer feedback into product feature requests.
  • Build automation workflows to scale customer engineering functions.
  • Define and document the customer engineering playbook.

Benefits

  • Early employee equity opportunity at a funded, early-stage AI startup.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding, first-non-founder hire at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup building conversational agents that run automated product demos for B2B go-to-market teams. You'll own every customer relationship and build the playbook for scaling from a small initial customer base to thousands. The role sits at the intersection of technical implementation, customer success, and product feedback - working directly with the CTO to shape what gets built.
What You'll Do
  • Own end-to-end customer relationships from onboarding through ongoing success, including improving demo performance and driving adoption
  • Teach and coach AI agents on product positioning, buyer personas, pricing conversations, and sales workflows
  • Serve as the voice of the customer - analyze conversation logs and feedback to identify patterns and surface insights for the product team
  • Translate customer feedback into actionable product feature requests in close collaboration with engineering and the CTO
  • Build automation workflows and systems (scripting, APIs, low-code/no-code tools) to help the customer engineering function scale efficiently
  • Define and document the customer engineering playbook from scratch
What We're Looking For

Required
  • 0-3 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role in SaaS (e.g., solutions engineer, customer engineer, technical account manager)
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable leading product demos and customer onboarding sessions
  • Hands-on experience building automation workflows to scale customer-facing tasks (scripting, APIs, or low-code/no-code tools)
  • Experience analyzing customer feedback and conversation logs to identify patterns and inform product decisions
  • Ability to work cross-functionally and translate customer needs into concrete product improvements
  • Experience coaching or configuring AI agents for sales contexts - defining tiers, personas, and pricing conversations is a plus

Requirements & Eligibility
  • Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
  • Must be able to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
Compensation & Benefits
  • Base salary: $140,000 - $185,000 USD annually
  • Early employee equity opportunity at a funded, early-stage AI startup
Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote and hybrid arrangements are not available for this role.

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