Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

• Form Energy is scaling on every axis at once — research, first-of-a-kind manufacturing, field deployment, and the business that runs behind them — and everywhere it scales, the same pattern repeats: brilliant people held back by fragile spreadsheets, manual handoffs, and software that doesn’t exist yet
• As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the person we send at those problems
• You will embed directly with the teams that do Form Energy’s hardest work — scientists, engineers, operators, and business leaders — find the highest-leverage problems in their world, and build the software and AI that solves them
• One quarter that might be a governed system of record replacing a load-bearing spreadsheet; the next, an AI agent that removes a week of manual toil; the next, a full-stack application that becomes the way a team works
• You will not wait for perfect requirements or hand off to someone else to build
• You go where the leverage is, ship, and stay with what you built as it matters more
• This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role for someone who wants their work measured in problems solved, not tickets closed
• Embed with the teams you serve — across R&D, manufacturing, field and commercial operations, and the functions that support them — to understand their hardest problems firsthand, then design and build the software that solves them
• Hunt for leverage and act on it. Diagnose where a team is bottlenecked by missing software, manual process, or brittle tooling; make the call on what’s worth building; and deliver it. Exercising judgment about what to build is as much of this job as building it well
• Spearhead the adoption of AI-driven automation in the functions you’re embedded with — prototype and ship AI-enabled tools and agents, and drive real adoption with the people who will use them, all within the guardrails set by Form Energy’s independent AI-governance function
• Own applications end to end: full-stack web applications (e.g., React / Next.js / TypeScript front ends, Python / FastAPI back ends, PostgreSQL) that become governed systems of record and decision-support tools — from data model through UI to production deployment and the users who depend on them
• Turn expert knowledge into durable software — take the spreadsheets, notebooks, and tribal knowledge that a team runs on and turn them into correct, maintainable, owner-attributed systems that the organization can trust and build on
• Build governed, traceable data models: versioned, append-only revision history with role-based access, so the assumptions and records that drive decisions are defensible and reconstructable
• Integrate with Form Energy’s enterprise systems — the Snowflake data platform (read-only reference data), enterprise applications (Oracle, Arena, Jama, and others), and shop-floor / operational systems — respecting each system’s authoritative boundary and never writing into systems you don’t own
• Ship to production reliably: containerized services, CI/CD, and deployment on Form Energy’s internal Kubernetes platform, with the observability, testing, and documentation needed to operate what you build
• Use AI aggressively as a force multiplier in how you build — AI-assisted and agentic development — to deliver more, faster, and at higher quality than a conventional engineering approach would allow
• Work in a fast, prototype-to-product style: get a working thing in front of users quickly, iterate beside them, and harden it into software the team can rely on — without accumulating unmanageable debt

Benefits

• 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums covered for employees
• Health insurance coverage begins first day of employment
• Health Savings Account
• Generous PTO policies to enable employees to recharge when needed
• An Employee Resource Program that provides mental health counseling services, legal guidance, financial resources, and other helpful consulting services
• 80% of the total medical, dental, and vision premiums covered for dependents
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 14 weeks for the birthing parent
• Access to a Dependent Care Account
• Access to a Health Flexible Spending Account
• Access to a Commuter Benefits Account
• Access to an Adoption Assistance Flexible Spending Account
• Stock options granted to all employees
• Stock equity education and tax advice service provided by Carta
• Company sponsored 401k
• Access to an annual budget for professional development
• License to complete Gallup’s Strengths Finder Assessment and ongoing resources
• 100% employer-sponsored coverage life insurance, and short and long-term disability policies

Preferred experience

• Solid engineering fundamentals: version control (Git), automated testing, CI/CD, and containerized deployment (Docker; Kubernetes a plus)
• Range and self-direction. A history of walking into unfamiliar domains, getting fluent fast, and shipping — comfortable being the sole or primary engineer on a system and owning the outcome, not just the code
• Strong full-stack engineering skills: a modern web framework (React / Next.js / TypeScript or similar) and a production back-end language and framework (Python / FastAPI strongly preferred), with solid relational data modeling (PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy or equivalent)
• A pragmatic, ownership-minded bias toward shipping value quickly, paired with the taste to know when something needs to be built to last
• AI as a force multiplier — required, not optional. A demonstrated command of AI-assisted and agentic development to build faster and better, and a track record of embedding AI / ML into applications and workflows to remove toil and create leverage. You should be energized by driving AI adoption in others, not only using it yourself
• Ability to model a complex real-world domain in software — translating messy, expert-held knowledge into correct, maintainable systems — and the rigor to enforce invariants in the data layer, not only in application code
• Comfort working directly with non-engineering domain experts, embedded in their environment, translating ambiguous problems into shipped software — and the judgment to push back on the wrong thing and find the right one
• 8+ years building and shipping production software, with a track record of owning complex applications end to end
• Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineer — working alongside the users of what you build rather than behind a backlog
• Experience building agentic or AI-automation systems for real operational workflows, and a point of view on where AI does and does not belong
• Experience with operations research / optimization or simulation (linear / mixed-integer programming, discrete-event simulation) — a strong plus for the harder modeling problems you’ll meet
• Experience with enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, dbt) and the discipline of read-only vs. writable system boundaries
• Experience integrating with ERP (Oracle), PLM (Arena), MES, or requirements-management (Jama) systems
• Experience with enterprise identity / SSO (Microsoft Entra ID, OIDC)
• Fluency in a technical domain adjacent to Form Energy’s work — hardware, manufacturing, energy, scientific computing, or laboratory/industrial environments
• Experience in a high-growth technology or first-of-a-kind manufacturing environment