Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Company: Beacon Software
Location: Toronto, ON (also hiring in New York and San Francisco) - hybrid: minimum 3 days per week in office (4 preferred), plus 2-3 days per week of travel to portfolio company sites
Compensation: CA$180,000 - CA$260,000 base + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time

About Beacon Software

Beacon Software is a new kind of software holding company. Its mission is to buy, build, grow and hold great vertical-market software businesses for the long term. Beacon is not a financial firm. It is run by technology entrepreneurs who acquire companies with the intent to hold them permanently and keep investing in their growth, backed by a committed, long-term capital base with no plan to sell to another buyer.

Beacon was founded in 2024 by Nilam Ganenthiran (former President of Instacart and partner at D1 Capital) and Divya Gupta (former partner at Sequoia Capital). In November 2025 it announced a $250M Series B from investors including General Catalyst, D1 Capital, CPMG, Sator Grove and the family offices of John and Patrick Collison, Tony Xu, Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. The team is about 85 people across New York, San Francisco and Toronto.

The Role

This is a Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineer role at a software holding company. You will embed directly with Beacon's portfolio companies, ship agentic software into their live operations, and own the outcomes end to end. You will not be writing decks. You will be building running systems, and because Beacon scales through software rather than headcount, what you build for one company is reused across every company in the same vertical.

From day one you will be the technical face of Beacon to portfolio company general managers, with high-leverage scope and real influence on how the whole company grows.

What You Will Do

• Embed with portfolio companies to understand their operating model, earn operator trust, and identify the two or three highest-leverage workflow opportunities for agentic software.
• Ship the wedge: build integrations, prompts, evals and UI surfaces to land the first agentic workflow at each company on Beacon's core platform.
• Operate and tune deployed systems after launch, adjusting levels of autonomy and handing off cleanly to portfolio operations once they are stable.
• Serve as Beacon's technical face to portfolio company GMs: build trust, set expectations, and make sure the system is seen as their leverage.
• Bring patterns back to headquarters and turn what you learn into reusable playbooks that speed up every future deployment in the same vertical.

What You Bring

• 3-6 years of experience in full-stack, customer-facing software or product engineering, or forward deployed engineering. 4-6 years with a mix of larger-company and startup experience is ideal.
• Full-stack proficiency: TypeScript or Python on the backend, React on the frontend, and SQL. You can own delivery end to end on your own.
• Experience shipping production LLM or agentic software to real users, with evals, autonomy gating and outcome tracking, not just demos or prototypes.
• Prior embedded or customer-facing engineering experience, such as a forward deployed, solutions or deploy-and-operate role.
• Operator instincts: you can read a P&L, turn ambiguous business problems into scoped technical solutions, and quickly earn the trust of non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong executive presence and polished communication with C-suite leaders and GMs.
• Daily use of AI development tools and agents to automate your own work.
• A consistent track record with meaningful tenure and growth in your roles.
• Comfort with frequent travel to portfolio company sites (2-3 days per week).

Nice to Have

• Experience at a recognizable early-stage or high-growth startup
• Exposure to private equity, consulting, or vertical SaaS operating environments (portfolio operations, M&A integration or similar)
• Founder or founding-engineer background
• Programming experience in Go

Interview Process

Recruiter screen (30 min), technical screen (30 min), 2-hour AI take-home project, take-home follow-up (30 min), then a combined system design and experience/values interview (45 min).

Tech Stack

TypeScript, Python, React, SQL, LLMs and foundation models, agentic workflows, evals, Snowflake, Databricks, Apache Iceberg, event-driven systems