Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineers sit between our training platform and the teams who depend on it. You will embed with a customer, understand how their agents actually run, and make the pragmatic technical decisions that turn a promising evaluation into a change that holds up in production.

The work is end to end: instrumenting an agent so its traces become usable training data, shaping evaluation sets with the customer's domain experts, running training jobs, and shipping the resulting model behind their existing stack. You will own outcomes, not tickets.

What you'll do

• Lead technical onboarding for new customers, from data access to the first measured improvement
• Translate messy production traces into clean, well-labeled datasets and evaluation tasks
• Run and debug post-training experiments alongside our research team
• Build the integration glue (SDKs, adapters, dashboards) customers need to adopt new model versions safely
• Bring what you learn in the field back into the product

Requirements

• Strong fundamentals in at least one modern language (Python, TypeScript, Go)
• Experience shipping and operating backend systems that other people depend on
• Comfort reading and reasoning about LLM agent traces, prompts, and tool-call logs
• Clear written and spoken communication; you will spend real time with customers
• Ability to turn an ambiguous ask into a small, concrete plan and execute it

Nice to have

• Hands-on fine-tuning or RL experience with open-weight models
• Prior consulting, solutions, or founding experience

Compensation & benefits

• Base salary: $170,000 to $260,000
• Meaningful early-stage equity
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Relocation support to San Francisco
• Daily lunch in the office and a learning stipend

About Clad Labs

Clad Labs is an applied AI lab building systems to train, evaluate, and continuously improve production agents. We turn the data a company already generates, real requests, tool calls, and human corrections, into training signal, and we measure every change against held-out tasks before it ships.

We are a small team working in person in San Francisco. We care about doing careful work on hard problems, and about being honest with customers about what improved, what regressed, and what we do not know yet.

Clad Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.