Forward Deployed Engineer

Lemma offers an AI platform that automates prompt optimization and continuous learning for model improvement.

Location: San Francisco, CA
Company size: 2–10
Posted: 3w ago
Via: Yc

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Job listing · Updated 21 AUG 2026

Forward Deployed Engineer

Lemma· San Francisco, CA, USView company profile

Job title: Forward Deployed Engineer
Job location: San Francisco, CA, US
Job listing URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/uselemma/jobs/vWvNh1i-forward-deployed-engineer
Job description: Lemma reads all of your agent conversations, finds the failures nobody knew to look for, and opens the PR that fixes them. ### Why this role exists For our first design partners we didn't sell software. We embedded. We sat in their Slack, read their traces at odd hours, learned their agent's failure modes better than they had, and opened PRs against their repo. Wordware shipped 8 PRs in one morning off issues we surfaced. Issues they didn't know they had. It worked, and it doesn't scale as a founder activity. This role is that motion, productized. You go into a new customer, get them to the moment where Lemma surfaces something that makes them sit up, and then take everything you learned doing it by hand and turn it into product so the next customer doesn't need you in the room. If you want a clean separation between customer work and engineering work, this isn't it. The whole job is the seam between them, and roughly half of it is committing to our codebase rather than theirs. ### What you'll do * Own new customers end to end: integration, first traces, first surfaced failure, first merged PR * Live in customer Slack channels. You'll know their agent architecture better than most of their engineers do * Write the detection logic and evals that catch a given customer's specific failure modes, then generalize the ones that recur * Open PRs against unfamiliar codebases and defend them in review to people who didn't ask for your help * Be the only Lemma person in the room for the hard conversations. Security review, deployment architecture, "why should we trust your patches" * Feed everything back into the product so the manual version of this job gets smaller every quarter ### What we're looking for * 3+ years shipping production software, plus something in your history that shows you're good in front of customers. Forward deployed, solutions engineering, consulting, founding, running your own thing * Strong TypeScript. You'll be reading unfamiliar agent codebases constantly and writing patches for them * You've built with agents and have real opinions about why they fail * Genuinely fast. Our whole pitch is compressing the time between "something is broken" and "it's fixed." You should embody that * Comfortable with the ambiguity of walking into a company you don't know and figuring out what matters in a week * Bonus: you were the customer once. You ran agents in production and got burned We move fast on hiring. Target is an offer within two weeks of first contact. Onsite in San Francisco, with travel to customers. We sponsor visas.

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