Staff Forward-Deployed Engineer

What this role actually is

You'll be embedded with a small group of our customers - smaller, member-owned electric utilities (often rural) and the manufacturers of the energy hardware they buy - from kickoff through production. Typical load is 3-5 concurrent accounts. Travel: expect roughly one multi-day site visit per month on average, ramping up as our customer base grows. That means:

• Joining our client operations team on customer calls. On the accounts you're embedded with, you'll understand what the customer actually needs (which is rarely what they first ask for) and you'll own the room when the conversation turns technical.
• Owning real software work end-to-end - two steps ahead. A lot of it is integration work: getting customer data onto the platform from new meters, sensors, and OEM devices. But it's broader than that. You'll also build things like energy-accounting and bill-credit reporting, behavioral demand-response programs that nudge end-customers via SMS instead of dispatching hardware, and the data pipelines and infrastructure those features ride on. When a customer brings something new, you don't ship a one-off - you design the reference architecture for things of that kind so the work for this customer becomes the template for the next several. Our customers share more of a common software stack than you'd expect, which is why this approach compounds.
• Being the technical voice on new opportunities. When the commercial team is evaluating a deal that touches an unfamiliar data class - say a customer with geothermal asking if Texture can support it - you're the person who does the landscape analysis, identifies the handful of vendors and control mechanisms involved, and decides what we're looking at: a clean platform fit, a services-only engagement, or a new data class worth building reference architecture for. The commercial team is great at understanding customer need; you're the one who can technically assess whether and how Texture should support it.
• Translating between technical and non-technical worlds. Most of our utility customers don't have a deep software team. Explaining "what the system needs to do" to people who don't think in software is the actual job. This skill is essential.
• Production ownership. What you ship is production code. You share on-call for the systems you build.

You'll work directly with our CTO and the rest of engineering to figure out what to build and how to build it. You're responsible for speccing the work yourself.
What 90 days looks like

By the end of your first 90 days you should be ramped on Texture's platform and architecture, on the realities of utility and OEM customers, and on what they actually need from software like ours. You should be hopping on calls directly with the technical people on the customer side and driving toward outcomes - not just listening. And you should be 30-60 days into your first reference-architecture project: a new class of data we don't yet support, where you've done the landscape analysis, made the platform-fit-vs-services call, and started building.
Who we're looking for

• 10+ years of engineering. You've shipped systems that mattered, repeatedly. You don't need someone to tell you what "production-ready" means.
• Operates independently. Comfortable owning ambiguity. You don't need a PM or a spec to make good decisions.
• Strong communicator, especially to non-technical audiences. This is load-bearing for the role.
• Breadth across the stack is a real plus. Backend integration work is the core, but the role naturally pulls in DevOps and infrastructure (we recently stood up a VPN tunnel and supporting infra to connect a customer's on-prem utility-scale battery system), data engineering (energy accounting and bill credits), and a bit of data science (assessing whether a behavioral demand-response push actually changed customer behavior). If you've worked across two or three of those areas, you'll be more effective here. None of them are requirements - judgment and willingness to learn matter more.
• Curious about the energy grid. You don't have to come from energy - most of us didn't. But if the words "co-op utility," "DER," "interconnection queue," or "load shifting" make you want to learn more, you'll have fun here.

Prior forward-deployed, solutions-engineering, or consulting experience is a plus, not a requirement. Two of our current engineers doing this kind of work hadn't done it before joining Texture and are doing a phenomenal job.
Stack (we use it; you don't need to come in knowing it)

TypeScript, React, Go, Kafka, GraphQL federation, AWS, TimescaleDB.

We've made the bet that great engineers can pick up languages and frameworks. What we hire for is judgment, ownership, and the ability to think across the stack. If you've never written Go and the rest looks familiar, we'll be fine.
Comp and logistics

• Annual base salary: $225,000 - $245,000
• Equity: 0.08 - 0.12% common stock options (we'll walk through the specifics in our first conversation)
• Benefits: medical, dental, vision (covered), 401(k), flexible PTO
• Location: remote-first. We have a great office in NYC and a slight preference for candidates in/near NYC, but it's not a requirement.
• Reports to: Victor Quinn, Co-founder and CTO

How to apply

Send a resume, a LinkedIn, and a 200-word answer to this question:

Describe a time you explained a technical system to a non-technical customer or stakeholder, and what you changed about your explanation when it wasn't landing.

We read every application. We don't do take-home assignments. The loop:

1. 30-min intro with our CTO
2. Two technical-depth conversations with two of our senior engineers
3. A panel "customer simulation": a live, simulated customer engagement with several members of the team, followed by their questions for you
4. Two final conversations: with our Head of Delivery and Client Ops, and our Principal Software Architect
5. Offer

Typical timeline from first conversation to offer: 2 weeks.