This role is based in Seattle, Washington (open to considering San Francisco-based candidates)

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup building the hivemind for human-AI teams: shared memory and collaboration tools that keep people and AI coworkers genuinely aligned and productive as one team. We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer to be our builder at the customer boundary.

The Job

Be SageOx's builder at the customer boundary — the first line of partnership for every team we serve. Embedded where customers live (their Slack, their office), this engineer turns friction into shipped product: educating teams, unlocking value, and building the fixes and features that customer experience demands. Customers reach daily-active use because this person exists — and the roadmap stays directly aligned to customer needs because of the feedback they synthesize.

What You'll Actually Do

First line of engagement: Live where customers live; catch issues as they arrive; triage everything; fix some directly and escalate only what genuinely needs deeper core-engineering context — with a clean repro and context. Today the engagement surface is shared Slack channels — right for now, while we're under ~30 teams and know every one by name — but over time it may shift. This person helps identify the best way to stay engaged and meets customers where they are.
Onboard new customers onsite: Run onboarding in person at the customer's office — setup, workflow design with their team, first-value moments witnessed and secured.
Build on the core product. This is not a support role with a code editor nearby — this person IS a builder. They own customer-reported items end-to-end: bug to merged PR, small feature to shipped. The customer-reported queue is their backlog into the core codebase, and their commits are how customer pain becomes product, fast.
Create value, not just fixes: Design solutions and workflows with customer teams, educate users into power users, and turn recurring questions into reusable teaching — docs, how-tos, office hours. The job is measured in value unlocked, not tickets closed.
Own the signal loop: A daily and weekly customer digest for the whole team — issues, trends, feature friction, use-case patterns, verbatim quotes. This is how the team stays connected to customer truth without carrying the response traffic; it's a first-class deliverable, not a side note.
Shorten time-to-value every week: Each onboarding and each recurring issue should produce a fix, a doc, or a product suggestion that makes the next customer faster.

What Success Looks Like

7 days: All customer Slack traffic flows through them first; response times measured in minutes-to-hours; first onsite onboardings run; first weekly digest shipped.

60 days: Majority of issues resolved, triaged, or turned into clean bug reports without engineering escalation; first customer-reported items shipped to the core product (merged PRs, not just filed issues).

90 days: Time-to-first-value measurably down from their start; a repeatable onboarding playbook exists; escalations to core eng arrive with clean repros and are trending down; a steady cadence of customer-driven contributions landing in the product.

3+ months: Customers name them unprompted as a helpful and educational partner; onboarding runs without founder involvement; the digest visibly shapes the roadmap.

Who We're Looking For

Profile in one line: An engineer who chooses people — a builder with real technical chops who discovered they're happiest at the customer boundary: sharing, educating, helping, unlocking value.
Experience: Software engineer who migrated toward customers, or a solutions/support/sales engineer at a dev-tool or infra startup who ships fixes themselves. Early-startup exposure strongly preferred over big-co support orgs.
Technical bar: Debug an integration end-to-end and ship small features — not only bug fixes — unsupervised. Fast, pragmatic; moves independently but knows when to flag, ask for help, or request review.
Cultural fit: Energized (not drained) by customer pings and onsite visits; patient teacher; writes clearly — the digest and the onboarding materials are writing deliverables, and good ones compound: every improvement lets more teams self-onboard or self-unblock, easing this person's own load over time; embraces transparency; focused on making the team win.
AI-native: Comfortable with agent workflows and AI tooling; they'll be teaching customers to work with AI coworkers, so they must work that way themselves.
Logistics: Onsite onboarding makes travel a real constraint — genuinely travel-willing.

Location — Seattle, In Person

Same as every role here. In person, five days a week, in Seattle. FDE travel to customer sites happens occasionally — think a few days a quarter, not permanent road-warrior life.

One narrow exception: Bay Area-based candidates we can get to Seattle at least two weeks a month, through end of 2026.

How We Hire

No traditional interviews. We'll clear an initial assessment and invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days in Seattle, working on something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. Most of what matters shows up there faster than any interview loop could reveal.

Ajit wrote up why we hire this way: Read the post →

SageOx Today

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub → Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly). Small on purpose. More about the team →

Compensation

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit.

Apply

We're not working with recruiters or recruiting agencies/consultants at this time — direct applications only, please.