Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract)

realfast is an applied-AI strategy and engineering firm. We help software-driven enterprises turn urgent, high-stakes problems into products and platforms that move the metric. Founded by the team that scaled Gojek and backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) and RTP Global.

We started after ChatGPT, not before it, so there was never an old machine to retrofit. Every role, every process, every metric assumes agents do the grunt work and people do the judgment. Our people don't start from a blank repository — they build on Exo, our applied-AI platform, which is why four or five of them ship like a much larger team.

We hire for judgment, because everything that doesn't require it is already automated. What's left is the job.

Put more precisely: we hire people who have a high need for cognition. David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic:

“What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.”

His other line from that piece: when intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. That’s what we’re hiring for.

We hire forward deployed engineers full-time and on contract. Some of the best engineers we've worked with don't want a full-time job, and we'd rather work with them on their terms than not at all. It suits us as well: contract lets us size a team to the work instead of to headcount. The bar doesn't move either way — same assignment, same rounds, same standard once you're in.

Here's what we're looking for

A hacker-coded engineer - someone who'd rather build the tool than wait for it. You've shipped in ambiguous environments. You've picked up unfamiliar stacks and made them work. You've sat with a customer, figured out what actually matters, and built the thing that moved the number.

You understand why the business cares about what you're building - not just how to build it. You've already started using AI agents and coding assistants to do work better - faster, at a quality level that wasn't possible eighteen months ago. Here, you take that all the way.

The problems change constantly - Salesforce integrations one week, data pipelines the next, an AI agent the week after. You're embedded in client delivery, working directly with the founders, shipping production software that hits SLAs and moves metrics the client cares about. What stays constant: you ship fast and to a high bar. Beautiful work done quickly. Everything else is negotiable.

What you'll do

• Build stuff that solves real problems - directly with customers, using whatever tech gets the job done best

• Get your hands dirty across front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models

• Operate in cockpit mode. You steer. Your agents execute. Claude Code, Codex, and others write code, run tests, open PRs, update tickets, read and prioritise your email - GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Ashby, calendar, all of it. You engage with these systems through your agents, not around them

• Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast

• Have room to chase rabbit holes that might unlock a better way to build

• Help us hire by spotting people who can operate at this speed

What you'll bring

• 3-5 years of software engineering experience

• Strong coding skills across multiple languages - which ones don't matter, but discipline and craft do

• Appreciation for how businesses make money with software

• Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments

• Deep mastery of your craft — engineering, BA, QA, design, whatever your domain. You know good from mediocre on sight. Without that judgement, you can't raise an agent's bar, and raising the bar is the job

• You're comfortable in a terminal. Not a shell wizard — but you live in one, and it doesn't faze you

• At realfast, everyone codes — just like everyone communicates. You use agents to build small apps, scripts, and tools that make your own life better. Here you take that all the way

• You already spend hours every day working with AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, or the equivalent. If you don't, the pace here will feel alien

• Git is how we collaborate — not just engineers, everyone. You don't need to walk in fluent, but you need to be comfortable learning fast

• Clear, precise prose. You can reason through a problem in writing, explain your thinking to a colleague, and direct an AI agent with the same clarity. The quality of your reasoning on paper directly determines the quality of your output

• You read books. Not blog posts, not threads — books. The depth of thinking you bring to work comes from the depth of thinking you take in, and nothing substitutes for the long-form argument

Backgrounds we'd consider

• Software engineer at a startup or product company who's shipped full-stack features end-to-end and cares deeply about how the code reads, not just that it works

• Developer at a consultancy or agency who's worked directly with clients across varied tech stacks and brought craft to every one of them

• QA engineer who codes, automates, and has strong opinions about how software should be built — and is using AI to raise the bar on what "tested" means

• Designer who builds — prototypes in code, ships production UI, and is figuring out how AI changes what one person can make

• Business analyst or PM who's crossed into hands-on development, cares about the quality of what ships, and wants to stay in the building

• DevOps or platform engineer who's built applications, not just infrastructure, and is exploring how AI agents change the craft of delivery

• Other equivalent IC roles where you've combined hands-on building with a drive to elevate the quality of everything around you

This role is for you if

• AI tools are already part of how you work — you use them for research, drafting, analysis, and can't imagine going back

• You take pride in craft. Mediocre output from an agent bothers you, and you push until it isn't

• You're a polyglot engineer who loves to create working solutions, not just write code

• You want to use AI to drive concrete business outcomes - not just build cool tech

• You're obsessed with quality and craft - and you're figuring out how to use AI to elevate both

• You want to turn state-of-the-art research into reliable production systems

• You care why the business needs a thing, not just how to build it

• You want to operate across engineering, delivery, and client context

This role is NOT for you if

• You find terminals anxiety-inducing

• You don't code and don't intend to start

• You're not willing to learn git

• You struggle to express your reasoning clearly in writing

• You haven't woven AI tools into how you work

• You want to do the work yourself rather than direct agents to do it better and faster

• You don't read books

• You need detailed specs, clear boundaries, and extensive guidance to be productive

• You're looking for a purely coding-focused role

• You'd rather specialise narrowly than be dangerous across the stack

Learn more about

• Panel: Razorpay FTX 2026 — Going AI-Native

• Podcast: The Ken Zero Shot — Infosys and Cognizant's Message to Microsoft

• Yourstory: How realfast.ai is helping the IT services industry cut delivery times