Founding Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (AI)

Location: Hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in San Francisco, California; customer-site travel approximately 25–40%

Salary: $203,745–$275,655 USD per year, plus equity and benefits

Company

hirify.global is an AI platform for grocery retailers that helps reduce food waste and improve enterprise decision-making across fresh food, stores, and distribution centers.

What you will do

• Build, hire, develop, and lead a forward deployed engineering team from 0 to 1.
• Lead concurrent customer engagements, including technical roadmaps, staffing, architecture reviews, discovery sessions, and delivery quality.
• Own technical relationships with customer engineering and data leaders and translate business goals into scoped programs with costs and timelines.
• Define a reference architecture spanning hirify.global’s hosted platform and customer-cloud deployments.
• Decide which capabilities become shared platform features, which remain customer-specific, and which should not be built.
• Convert deployment learnings into reusable playbooks, starter repositories, and platform improvements while traveling to customer sites as needed.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, consulting, or technical customer-facing roles.
• At least 2 years managing engineers in a services, post-sales, or forward deployed organization.
• Experience building and scaling a team from 0 to 1, including hiring and setting technical standards.
• Architectural range across data ingestion, data modeling, applications, and AI, with fluency in SQL and a modern cloud data platform such as Databricks, BigQuery, or Snowflake.
• Production AI and LLM experience across retrieval, tool use, and agentic workflows, including quality measurement.
• Must work in a hybrid arrangement with 3 days per week in San Francisco and be willing to travel to customer sites approximately 25–40%.

Nice to have

• Grocery, retail, or supply chain data experience.
• Experience building forward deployed, professional services, or solutions engineering functions from scratch.
• Production knowledge graphs, ontologies, or semantic layers.
• Experience delivering products in both vendor-hosted and customer-owned cloud environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven work focused on reducing food waste through AI.
• Engineering-led forward deployed organization with an emphasis on technical architecture and reusable solutions.
• Medical, dental, vision, mental health, and counseling coverage for U.S. employees.
• Equity, 401(k) with company match, home office stipend, and coworking wallets for eligible U.S. employees.
• Professional development budget, wellness and telecommunications stipends, and flexible paid time off.
• This position is not eligible for company visa sponsorship.