Forward Deployed Engineer
Heads · Stockholm, SE ·
- Category
- Solutions engineering
Heads · Stockholm, SE ·
Most engineers build for users they never meet. This role is different.
At Heads, we are a deep-tech company on a mission to build the world's most loved enterprise software platform. We handle massive data volumes (billions of records annually), stringent correctness requirements, and complex business logic using a vertically integrated software stack, including a bespoke in-memory database and a highly flexible frontend. Think of our platform as Minecraft for enterprise applications: a dynamic environment where functionality is modified at runtime, heavily woven with AI. We are a mature business with major customers like Gekås Ullared, Telenor, and Dollarstore, powering everything from POS to inventory management.
Our engineering team operates in two units: Platform Development (the core database layer) and the Retail Application Unit (the fast-moving product team). As an FDE within the Retail Application Unit, you sit at the exact intersection of our applications and live client environments. Projects often start with an open-ended question like "How do we make a queue at one of Europe's largest stores never form?" or "How do we make a stock count disappear as a task entirely?" You own the full implementation loop - from discovery to a polished, production-grade product that retail staff love to use.
Embed directly with our retail customers to diagnose core workflow challenges, identifying real transactional requirements and underlying operational bottlenecks.
Leverage AI development assistants and modern generation capabilities to rapidly prototype and deploy application configurations. You will focus heavily on what gets built and why, as the majority of code won't be physically written by you anymore.
Build highly interactive interfaces and application extensions as part of live deployments that our customers rely on to large retail operations.
Watch store staff interact with the system in the wild, treating UI friction points as critical data to design automated, intelligent workflows that make manual operational steps completely disappear.
Set up and operate customer environments on Linux: provisioning staging, pilot, and production environments, and handling networking, TLS, monitoring, logging, and backup/restore.
Manage the application deployment lifecycle from staging environments to pilot stores, ensuring absolute system stability and zero downtime during updates in high-volume environments, with safe, rehearsed update and rollback procedures.
Onboard customer data: migrate legacy retail data (products, pricing, stock, customers) into the platform ontology, and connect integrations with payment providers, loyalty systems, e-commerce platforms, and store peripherals.
Act as the technical escalation point during go-lives, with on-site presence in pilot stores when it matters most, and train superusers and store staff so deployments stick.
Act as the primary interface between active deployments and our Platform team, ensuring client needs are solved elegantly at the application layer while scaling our standard product roadmap.
You think from first principles, with massive technical breadth and depth, judging new technologies on merit over hype. You hold an AI-native mindset: AI has fundamentally reshaped engineering, and you look at retail operations through a lens of automation.
You default to a configuration-first approach, maximizing our platform's native settings, layout capabilities, and foundational ontology before jumping into code, and you are comfortable with our "dumb terminal" style view model layer for the application (which replaces traditional REST/GraphQL APIs) backed by a high-performance in-memory layer.
You bring strong TypeScript proficiency and excel at utilizing AI coding assistants to dramatically accelerate UI development across a modular frontend that mixes React, Vue, and Web Components.
You are comfortable in Linux server environments (shell scripting, reading logs, basic networking and DNS/TLS, monitoring and observability tooling) and can script in Python or Node for data migration and automation.
You possess strong visual judgment to ensure user interfaces feel considered and polished, knowing that in retail, great UX directly impacts checkout speed and reduces costly operational errors.
You bring deep domain context and empathy from a background in retail, commerce, or B2B SaaS, reading rooms well to understand what operations actually need versus what a client might ask for.
You demonstrate high-agency delivery, with a proven ability to ship end-to-end and develop new requirements in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments without rigid specs.
You are completely fluent in English and Swedish, with the ability and interest to travel to customer sites across the Nordics: up to 25%, concentrated around discovery phases and go-lives, and flexible based on personal preferences.
You leave a customer engagement with a highly optimized, beautifully designed application configuration in production that hundreds of users love, and a clean blueprint of architectural insights passed to our core teams to scale the standard product. You protect the core platform while making our retail applications hyper-adaptive.
Experience working with retail hardware integrations like payment terminals, receipt printers, scanners, or RFID systems.
Experience building advanced AI implementations such as agentic workflows, LLM integrations, or RAG systems inside enterprise business systems.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code, containers, or CI/CD pipelines for repeatable customer deployments.
A background in technical consulting, solutions engineering, or customer-facing technical delivery roles within the European enterprise software sector.
Compensation & Benefits: Competitive European-level base salary, employee stock options, private health insurance, comprehensive pension scheme, 30 days of annual leave, and a €450 (5,000 SEK) annual wellness allowance.
True Flexibility: Work from another country for a few weeks, or request specialized hardware (like a split keyboard, a 4K monitor, or an FPGA) to test a hunch. Generally, the answer is yes.
No Red Tape: No procurement committees, no month-long approval processes. Conferences, European tech courses, books, or weird side experiments: if it makes you better, we're all in.
We're small enough that if it makes you better, we're in.