Role Overview

Routines are Athena AI’s product for standing procedures: an Executive Assistant adopts a curated outcome once, grants bounded authority, sets a schedule, and Athena runs it going forward without custom workflow building. A Routine is really a workflow built out of underlying processes and skills, and building or polishing a good workflow and skill is often the harder, less obvious part of the job. Routines are the heartbeat of daily engagement with Athena AI.

The Forward Deployed Engineer, Routines will work directly with Athena's clients and XPs to configure, customize, and troubleshoot Routines so they fit each client's real workflow -- then turn what's learned into better templates and product improvements. This role sits between individual client problems and the Athena AI and Routines roadmap, and requires a technical/product background, hands-on experience building AI automations, the empathy to quickly understand what a client actually needs, and enough product judgment to know when a one-off fix should become a template. 

Responsibilities:

Partner Directly with Clients and XPs: Work one-on-one to configure, test, and troubleshoot Routines against each client's real workflows, tools, escalation rules, and edge cases.

Help XPs Build and Polish Their Own Skills: Work hands-on with XPs to develop and refine the individual skills they need, so those skills can be used by the Athena AI agent or plugged into a Routine wherever applicable.

Customize and Extend Routines for Real Cases: When a stock template doesn't fit, build the custom skill, integration, or tool that makes it work, then judge whether it belongs in the core product.

Curate What Graduates into a Template: When a client-specific build proves valuable, decide whether it should become a reusable template or client-archetype variant, and shape what that first version looks like -- in partnership with product and engineering.

Strengthen the Core Routine Set: Contribute to the pre-installed Routines every EA should have running from day one such as Morning Brief, Inbox Sweep, Calendar Audit, Travel Dossier, Meeting Prep Pack, and what comes next.

Turn Onboarding into Routines: Embed with the onboarding team, learn how clients and EAs get ramped up today, and automate and productize that process inside Athena.

Feed the Product Roadmap: Bring recurring client pain points, failure patterns, and feature requests back to the Routines product team as clear, prioritized requirements.

Qualifications:

Experience: Background in software engineering, technical product management, or a similarly technical/product role, with deep hands-on experience building your own AI automations.  You already use tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cowork to automate parts of your life or work, and can demo what you've built. (Expect to demo personal automation as part of the interview.) Prior experience as a forward-deployed engineer, solutions engineer, or other client-embedded technical role is strongly preferred.

Technical Skills: Comfortable working with integrations and APIs, LLM-based agent systems, and automation/workflow tooling. Familiarity with orchestration frameworks or evaluation pipelines is a plus.

Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, paired with the empathy to sit with a client or XP and quickly get past the stated request to the real underlying problem.

Product Judgment: Comfortable spotting when a one-off solution should become a template, and shaping that first version, without needing to own the full roadmap or engagement metrics.

Collaboration: Excellent teamwork and communication skills, comfortable working directly with clients one-on-one, and translating those conversations into clear requirements for the product and engineering teams.

Adaptability: Energized by solving one client's problem at a time rather than designing only for the average case; able to manage multiple client engagements in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.