Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About Cinchapi

Cinchapi is where business runs itself. Our operational AI platform powers Ambient Agents that own ongoing outcomes, guided by your high-level goals and KPIs.

Instead of directing AI task by task, you define what success looks like. Ambient Agents figure out how to achieve and sustain it by working continuously in the background to plan, act, orchestrate workflows, and adapt as conditions change.

For enterprises and small businesses alike, Cinchapi turns fragmented data and AI into operations that run autonomously.

We’re an Atlanta-based, founder-led company at an inflection point: the product is live, the AI market is exploding, and we’re ready to build a repeatable revenue engine. That’s where you come in.

The role

We’re hiring a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to help our first customers put Cinchapi to work in their businesses. You’ll work directly with the founder, engineering team, and go-to-market lead, taking customer deployments from the first technical conversation through production and ongoing improvement.

The work starts with understanding how a business operates: what people are trying to accomplish, where work gets stuck, and which systems and data they depend on. From there, you’ll design and build a solution on the Cinchapi platform, connecting systems, developing agent capabilities, and making sure the deployment delivers the results we agreed on with the customer.

Our initial focus is mid-market companies, with select enterprise design partners where there’s a strong fit. You might work directly with an operations leader on one engagement and navigate an IT team’s security and integration requirements on another. You’ll need to be comfortable with both.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not a position where you write recommendations and hand implementation to someone else. You’ll write production code, troubleshoot real systems, and stay involved after launch. As our first FDE, you’ll also help us figure out how to make deployments more consistent and less dependent on custom work as we grow.

What you’ll do

• Work with customers to understand their operations, identify a useful starting point, and agree on what success looks like. You’ll turn a broad business goal into a practical scope, with clear requirements and measurable outcomes.

• Build the integrations, data connections, agent capabilities, and interfaces needed to make a deployment work. You’ll use the Cinchapi platform wherever it fits and write the code needed to connect it to the customer’s environment.

• Configure Ambient Agents around the customer’s goals and KPIs, giving them the context, tools, permissions, and boundaries they need to operate effectively over time.

• Establish how we test and monitor each deployment. You’ll evaluate agent behavior, handle failure cases, and decide where human review or approval is needed, taking reliability, security, privacy, and operating costs into account.

• Take promising prototypes into production. That includes resolving integration issues, managing technical scope, documenting how the system works, and making sure someone can diagnose and recover from problems after launch.

• Partner with the go-to-market lead on technical discovery, demos, and pilot design. They’ll own the commercial process; you’ll help determine what we can deliver, what it will take, and how we’ll demonstrate its value.

• Help customer teams understand and use what you build. You’ll lead practical training, answer questions honestly, and make sure customers know how to oversee their agents and when to step in.

• Bring recurring needs and deployment lessons back to the engineering team. When an integration or capability would help multiple customers, you’ll help turn it into something reusable rather than rebuilding it for every engagement.

• Develop the implementation practices, documentation, and tools that future FDEs will use. As the team grows, you’ll help hire and mentor the people who join you.

What success looks like

In your first 90 days, you’ll develop a working command of the platform and lead an initial customer deployment from discovery into production. You’ll establish success metrics and reliability checks, while documenting the gaps and lessons we should address before the next deployment.

By six months, you’ll have evidence of customer value from live deployments and a clearer understanding of which use cases we can deliver reliably. Useful integrations and implementation patterns should be reusable, and customer feedback should be informing product improvements.

By the end of the first year, we should have a repeatable approach to technical delivery, customers who can point to measurable improvements in their operations, and a foundation that allows additional FDEs to become productive without starting from scratch.

We’ll judge the work by how well it serves customers over time, not just how quickly we can launch a pilot.

Who you are

You have roughly five or more years of software engineering experience and have taken systems from an incomplete set of requirements into production. You’re a strong generalist who can work across backend services, APIs, and data, with enough frontend experience to build a usable interface when needed. We care more about what you’ve built and owned than how many years you’ve spent with a particular framework.

We’re especially interested in how you work:

• You’ve built with LLMs or agentic systems beyond a basic demo. You can explain how you tested their behavior, what failed, and how you decided they were ready for real users.

• You’re comfortable working directly with customers. You ask good questions, listen to how people actually do their jobs, and can explain technical decisions to both an engineer and a business owner.

• You have a solid grasp of data modeling, querying, APIs, authentication, and integrations. You can debug a problem that spans several systems, including ones you didn’t build.

• You can take an ambiguous goal and propose a sensible path forward. You know when to reuse an existing capability, when custom code is justified, and when a request needs to be narrowed or reconsidered.

• You’re honest about what AI can and cannot do. You’re willing to explain a limitation, raise a concern, or recommend human oversight rather than make a promise the system can’t keep.

• You can manage competing priorities across customer engagements without losing track of commitments. You communicate risks early and stay accountable when something goes wrong.

• You’re based in Atlanta or willing to relocate, and you can travel up to 25% for customer work and events.

Previous experience in forward deployed engineering, an early-stage engineering team, or hands-on technical consulting would be especially useful. So would experience navigating enterprise deployment requirements, teaching non-technical teams, or turning customer-specific work into a reusable product.

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $150,000–$180,000, depending on experience.
• Equity: 0.75%–1% in stock options, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff.
• Benefits: Health reimbursement and flexible PTO.

This is a full-time engineering role with meaningful ownership in the company. As our founding FDE, you’ll help shape both how we deliver for customers and how the team grows.

Why this role

You’ll get to build software and work directly with the people who depend on it. You’ll see where the product helps, where it falls short, and have a direct hand in improving it.

Because you’re joining early, you’ll also shape how Cinchapi works with customers and how the forward deployed engineering team grows. If you like understanding a business problem, building the solution, and staying close enough to see whether it actually worked, this role gives you responsibility for all three.