Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Details

Glean is the Work AI platform that helps everyone work smarter with AI. What began as the industry’s most advanced enterprise search has evolved into a full-scale Work AI ecosystem, powering intelligent Search, an AI Assistant, and scalable AI agents on one secure, open platform. With over 100 enterprise SaaS connectors, flexible LLM choice, and robust APIs, Glean gives organizations the infrastructure to govern, scale, and customize AI across their entire business - without vendor lock-in or costly implementation cycles.

At its core, Glean is redefining how enterprises find, use, and act on knowledge. Its Enterprise Graph and Personal Knowledge Graph map the relationships between people, content, and activity, delivering deeply personalized, context-aware responses for every employee. This foundation powers Glean’s agentic capabilities - AI agents that automate real work across teams by accessing the industry’s broadest range of data: enterprise and world, structured and unstructured, historical and real-time. The result: measurable business impact through faster onboarding, hours of productivity gained each week, and smarter, safer decisions at every level.

Recognized by Fast Company, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Gartner, Glean supports customers across 50+ industries and 1,000+ employees in more than 25 countries.

The Opportunity

You'll join as a founding member of Glean's forward deployed team and operate with the autonomy and accountability of a founder. Your job is to discover and build Glean's next generation of product surfaces, working in a pod with Forward Deployed PMs directly with the C-suite of the world's most influential companies and with Glean's own engineering and product teams.

Glean is a fully horizontal AI platform. You won't be configuring existing products or optimizing within defined constraints. You'll identify the biggest unsolved business problems at our most strategic customers, build entirely new products to solve them, and in doing so shape what Glean becomes. The best of what you build ships to every Glean customer in the world.

Responsibilities

• Discover and build Glean's next product surfaces: 0-to-1 product creation where nothing is predefined; design and ship new products that become what Glean ships.
• Lead deep opportunity discovery: understand structural business problems, form and pressure-test hypotheses with customers and Forward Deployed PMs.
• Be a technical partner to the C-suite: explain what you're building, why it will work, and the associated risks to executives and technical teams.
• Scale what works: make successful prototypes repeatable and work closely with core R&D to ensure scalability.
• Stay at the frontier with Glean's R&D team: collaborate with core engineering and product teams so field insights inform platform evolution.

Requirements

• 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software.
• 0-to-1 build track record: built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments; shipped something new that is used at scale.
• Production AI experience: shipped AI-powered solutions in the real world (prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, deployment at scale), not just prototypes.
• Full-stack technical depth: strong programming skills across the stack and deep understanding of how enterprise systems actually work.
• Business acumen and customer instinct: able to identify real problems, form product hypotheses, and build trust quickly at every level of an organization.
• Builder's judgment, curiosity, and scrappiness: know what's buildable, when to simplify scope, and able to solve problems independently.
• Willingness to travel: this role requires 25–50% travel.

Nice to Have

• Experience as a founder, at a top-tier technology company, or in a forward deployed engineering role.
• A technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or a related field.
• Deep familiarity with LLMs, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises.

Location

• This role is hybrid (3–4 days a week in our NYC office).
• This role requires 25–50% travel.

Compensation & Benefits

• The standard range for this position is $160,000–$270,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits.
• Benefits include Medical, Vision, and Dental coverage, generous time-off policy, opportunity to contribute to a 401(k) plan, a home office improvement stipend, annual education and wellness stipends, regular company events, and daily healthy lunches.

Glean is committed to an inclusive and diverse company and does not discriminate based on protected characteristics.