As the first Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will bridge the gap between sales and product by owning the entire post-sale customer lifecycle. You will design deployment plans for complex global trade workflows, build the FDE function from scratch, and lead technical implementations that transform messy legacy data into automated intelligence.
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Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at CommodityAI
We are looking for a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to join a high-growth AI startup revolutionizing the global commodities industry. This is a rare chance to build a critical function from the ground up at a company that is already selling faster than it can onboard. You will sit at the intersection of customers, product, and engineering, designing the technical playbooks that automate the trillion-dollar world of physical trade. If you have 5+ years of technical deployment experience and want high-agency leadership in a San Francisco-based team, this role offers the perfect blend of technical challenge and strategic impact.
About this role
Role overview
About the company
CommodityAI is a modern AI-powered commodity management and agentic operating system built for physical commodity traders, distributors, and operators. It provides an integrated trading and operations management system that eliminates friction in physical commodities trading by automating manual workflows, reducing data entry, and improving visibility into key processes such as shipment tracking, inventory management, and document processing.[1][3] The platform uses intelligent automation agents and collaborative tools tailored to commodity operations to handle thousands of shipments and millions of shipment-related documents, classifying and extracting relevant fields to create a unified, system-ready data layer.[2] CommodityAI brings together automated position management, shipment tracking, logistics, and commercial and finance workflows on a single operating system so that data flows seamlessly between applications, giving teams a shared source of truth, robust audit trails, and AI-powered insights to run trading operations more efficiently and at greater scale.[1][2][3][5][6]
What you'll do
What you will do
- Lead technical deployments from contract signature to go-live, configuring LLM-based systems and data models for complex trade workflows.
- Translate real-world customer pain into crisp product specs, influencing the engineering roadmap based on deployment patterns.
- Develop repeatable onboarding templates and AI-assisted workflows to drastically reduce time-to-value for global trading enterprises.
Who you are
Who this is a fit for
- 5+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Product roles at high-growth startups.
- Technical proficiency to write code, debug complex APIs, and reason through structured and unstructured data models.
- Exceptional communicator capable of navigating conversations with both executive stakeholders and technical engineering teams.
Why this role
Why this role is remarkable
- High-agency leadership opportunity to build the entire FDE function from the ground up, including hiring plans, playbooks, and internal tooling.
- Tackle the massive global commodities market by replacing legacy spreadsheets and PDFs with a sophisticated AI-driven operating layer.
- Work directly with the founding team in a fast-paced environment where product-market fit is driving demand faster than the current onboarding capacity.
Jack & Jill
How Jack & Jill work together
I get to know what you’re great at, then find roles you’d never find yourself.Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.
I recruit from Jack’s network and make the intro when I spot a great match.And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.
Meet Jack
Jack gets to know what you're great at and what you want next, then searches 15 million jobs daily and helps you discover roles at companies like this.
How does this work?
Jack’s an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack’s network.
If it’s a match and the company wants to meet you, they’ll make the intro. In the meantime, if you’d like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.