Forward Deployed Engineer

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
$235,000 - $320,000
Posted Oct 6, 2026

Skills

JavaScript
Machine Learning
Python
TypeScript
CI/CD

Job description

SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.

FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER

You embed directly with customer teams as the engineer on the ground: own an outcome, ship a production-grade SpaceXSI system that still runs after you leave, and become the critical technical feedback loop from the field back to product engineering. The work is the project. One week you might take a messy business workflow and put a production agent on it: pick the use case, stand up the architecture, wire it into the customer's auth, data, and tools, then harden it with evals until the team actually uses it. Another week you might live in a customer's repo and delivery system and ship an agent-powered path for a migration, a PR review loop, or an incident-to-fix flow, behind tests, review, and rollout rather than in a chat sidebar.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

•Lead discovery with the customer: orient in their codebases and workflows, find the real bottleneck and the use case worth building, and define clear success metrics

•Design and ship production agents, AI applications, and coding-agent workflows on Grok and our models, on live business processes and inside the customer's engineering org

•Get a first version live in days, then harden it over weeks with rollout, monitoring, and iteration from real usage

•Own production quality: tracing, evals, debugging model or delivery failures, and latency and cost tradeoffs

•Build the systems around the model (tools, MCP servers, retrieval, rules, skills, CI gates, and evals) and integrate them into the customer's auth, data, workflow, and delivery systems; decide when prompting, architecture, data, process, or a model change is the right lever

•Measure the outcome that matters (revenue, cost, hours saved, error rate, cycle time, escaped defects), not seat adoption

•Work directly with Staff+, platform, and domain leaders, going deep in their systems while communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results

•Leave the customer team able to run what you built, and turn what you learn into reusable patterns and improvements to SpaceXSI products

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

•5+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, or data science

•You've owned a customer or operator outcome, not just a slide or a prototype, and can turn a fuzzy problem into a scoped, shipped system

•You've built and owned AI-native workflows or agents in production (using Python, JavaScript/TypeScript), and debugged real production failures (model, tool, data, pipeline, or delivery path)

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

•2+ years in a customer-facing role, leading discovery conversations and being accountable for outcomes for external stakeholders

•Hands-on depth in several of: agents and tool-calling, eval harnesses, retrieval and context systems, CI/CD or developer platforms, and AI-native coding workflows in a real repo

•Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or platform engineer embedded with customers, or as a founding engineer who owned an AI product end to end

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

•Onsite role: must be able to work in person at the Australia or Singapore or Japan office

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary:

$235,000 - $320,000 USD

Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience.

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, which also includes equity, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.