Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
zoomlogi · San Francisco HQ ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Full time
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Experience
- 2+ years
zoomlogi · San Francisco HQ ·
Nobody calls a logistics coordinator to say things went well. They call because a $100,000 shipment of clinical trial medication has been sitting in customs for three days and nobody can explain why. Because a biologic therapy arrived outside its temperature window and the treatment has to start over. Because the patient is waiting and nobody in the supply chain can give a straight answer about the shipment’s location.
This is the problem we’re solving. We’re a year in, tracking over 500,000 shipments (including for Fortune 100 customers), and we’ve already cut manual ops effort in half. General Catalyst, Eclipse Ventures, and Virtue led the seed. The angels are all former or current operators who’ve spent careers tracking down shipments themselves, such as Head of Logistics at Bristol Myers Squibb, CMO of Cardinal Health, President of Novo Nordisk US, President of UPS Air, and CEO of Uber Freight. They know the market is as large as the problem is broken.
What we’ve built works, and the most interesting problems are still ahead of us.
- Olivier, Co-founder & CEO
This is a Forward Deployed Engineering role at a company that’s already in production. You’ll work directly with customers to deploy, configure, integrate, and roll out ZoomLogi across their operations, and you’ll write code that runs on real shipments from day one.
As our second Founding FDE, you’ll own implementations end to end: technical onboarding, data integration, troubleshooting, and ongoing optimization. You’re the critical feedback loop between customers and engineering, the person who hears the problem in a customer’s warehouse and turns it into product. Beyond deployment, you’ll ship features into the core platform alongside the engineering team. And you’ll carry GTM impact, helping identify opportunities and drive deals to close.
The work spans deployment, code, and commercial. If you want to be close to customers, close to the product, and close to the outcome, this is that seat.
Own implementations end to end. From the first technical onboarding call to a customer running ZoomLogi in production, you own it. Data integration, configuration, sensor and carrier setup, workflow design against each customer’s SOPs, troubleshooting, and the ongoing optimization that keeps a deployment healthy. When something breaks at 9pm before a Fortune 100 go-live, you’re the one who gets it live.
Integrate against the real world. The platform connects to 50+ external systems: carriers, IoT sensors, forwarders, telematics, weather, flight data, customer ERPs. Most don’t have clean APIs. Some claim a shipment is delivered while the GPS shows it still in transit. Some go silent without warning. Every new customer brings two or three of their own. You’ll build integrations that hold up against that messiness and feed patterns back into a framework that lets the next one ship in days.
Ship code into the core platform. This is not a configuration-only role. You’ll contribute features and improvements across our Python backend and TypeScript/React frontend, alongside engineering. What you learn in a deployment often becomes the thing you build the following week.
Close the feedback loop. You’ll be in customer calls constantly, because what you hear there is what should get built. You translate real-world operational complexity into product solutions, and you’re the voice in engineering planning that says “here’s what customers actually need.”
Carry GTM impact. You’ll help identify opportunities inside accounts and drive deals to close. Technical credibility in front of a prospect is often what moves a deal, and you’ll bring it.
Show up on site. Some deployments need you in the room. Expect to travel up to roughly 30% of the time to be on a customer’s floor, build alongside their ops team, and run demos in the environment where the product actually has to work.
You have a specific recent example of something you deployed, owned, and got working for a real customer. And you care about what happens after the kickoff call.
You’re comfortable with ambiguity. The most interesting problems here don’t come with detailed specs: you hear something from a customer, you figure out what to build or configure, and you do it. If you prefer a PM and a solutions architect to define the work before you start, this role will be frustrating for you.
You find the domain genuinely interesting. The compliance constraints, the quality/logistics tension, the fact that what you deploy is moving medication to real patients: these should feel like compelling design constraints, not obstacles. An engineer who finds regulated industries tedious won’t do their best work here.
You like customers. Not tolerate them, like them. The product and commercial decisions that come out of being in the room with an ops team are the ones worth making, and you’d rather be in that room than shielded from it.
You’re honest about what you don’t know. We debate hard, change our minds, and challenge each other, but always with the assumption that everyone is trying to get it right.
This role is probably not right for you if you want to go deep on one hard technical problem and be left alone, or if customer contact feels like a tax on engineering time. The surface area is wide: deployment, integrations, core platform code, troubleshooting, and commercial. If switching contexts drains you, this will too.
You have 2-10 years of professional experience as a forward deployed engineer, full-stack engineer, solutions/implementation engineer, or in a similar role where you’ve owned customer-facing technical work. You’re genuinely full-stack: comfortable across backend, frontend, and APIs, and able to ship production code on a small senior team. You’ve built 0-1 products and you’re comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with them. You’re strong in TypeScript/React and Python, or close enough to ramp quickly. You understand data modeling and API design, and you’ve done real integration work (APIs, ETL, webhooks, file feeds) and debugged it in production. You’re comfortable running technical onboarding and scoping integrations directly with customers. You’re based in San Francisco or Chicago and excited about being in the office.
Bonus: experience in logistics, supply chain, healthcare/life sciences, or another regulated, operationally complex domain.
Founded by a team of operators with deep experience in Logistics Tech & Healthcare (Ex-Uber Freight GM + Airspace CRO), joined by early engineers from the likes of Uber, Hippocratic AI, Assort Health and others. We’re here to solve a real-world problem at scale, by making every critical shipment visible, predictable, and on time, so potentially life-saving therapies reliably reach the people who need them.
Python, React/TypeScript, Kafka, AWS. We do a lot of low-fidelity prototyping, Google Slides included. LLM infrastructure and orchestration are increasingly central to how we build.
We move quickly.
Intro call: role fit, motivation, what you’ve shipped and deployed
Technical screen: a realistic problem close to the actual work
Onsite: we’ll work through a deployment-style problem together
References → Offer
Base salary: $150K-$200K
Equity: Above market (4-year vesting, 1-year cliff)
Benefits: Best-in-class medical and dental (100% self, 50% dependents)
Location: San Francisco HQ (Mission). Hybrid, 4 days/week in office.