Forward Deployed Engineer, San Francisco

- Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years of experience.

- Highly agentic: you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive

- Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized by customer collaboration

- Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. Expect to spend your first ~2 months in London embedded with the core engineering team.

- You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact

- You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow

- You expect regular hours and no travel - our team, customers, and investors span SF, London, and NYC

- You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems

- Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end

- Ex-founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit and a clear path to scale

- Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work

- Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint

As the first FDE in San Francisco and one of the earliest FDEs at Meticulous, you'll be instrumental in defining how this team operates, from processes and tooling to how it scales. Clear path into leadership as the function grows.

You grow through a combination of the people you work with, and the experiences you're exposed to. Within that context:

- Our philosophy is that density of talent is what matters; and so we've focused on keeping the team small but with exceptional individuals. You'll get to collaborate with world-class engineers who previously led 100+ person organizations at top companies, and we expect you'll find the team is beyond any you've worked in before, within big tech (Google, Meta, etc.) or otherwise.

This, combined with a focus on learning and growing together, means we're able to learn from each other at rapid pace.

- Beyond growing your skills through engineering and collaboration, the role involves spending a lot of time with engineering leaders at the fastest growing tech companies and leading firms in the world. We've found this gives us a unique exposure to a huge range of technologies, practices, techniques, codebases, architectures, cultures, learnings - what works, what doesn't.

It's a valuable bird eye view of collective learnings and experiences. These learnings normally take years or decades to build up as you move between companies.

There are few startups that grow as fast as we do. You'll be joining a small team on an exceptional trajectory. Through this comes unique growth, but also unique network.

Our investor network is one of the most active in tech - we'll use it to connect you with whoever helps you do your job better. You'll work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies, often at the highest levels.

Given the speed of growth, and desirability of the product amongst the leading enterprises, Meticulous provides the opportunity to build a network of connections across the full span of the technology world.

Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design that few engineers ever encounter - to help build something that changes the way software is developed.

Base salary $200K-$400K plus significant equity, exceeding compensation at top technology companies and startups.

- 🍲 Unlimited food & drinks in office - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever snacks you want for the office.

- 💻 A setup you'll love - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a $2.5k WFH budget to make home just as good

- 🌴 Team offsites - we work and play hard, we've done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts

- 📚 Unlimited book budget - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator!

We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future.

This role is on-site because we've found that the speed of iteration and depth of collaboration required for both customer success and technical excellence happens best in person.