Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

• Work with the customer's business and technical teams, up to their leadership, to turn a broad goal like "cut shrink in produce" into a scoped problem. Who will use it? What data exists? What does done look like? What won't we build?
• Find what the customer isn't telling you. That might be data that doesn't exist, a process that lives in one person's spreadsheet, or a security review that will take six weeks. Push back when what they're asking for won't get them the result they want.

• Design and build the solution on Afresh's platform: data pipelines, integrations, agents, workflows, and user-facing applications.
• Get a working pilot in front of the people who will use it, fast.

• Get it running in the customer's environment, working with their engineers and our platform team on the infrastructure.
• Watch how people actually use it, check that its answers are right, and iterate until it's part of how they work.

• Bring what you learned back to the platform. Work with the platform team to decide what becomes part of the platform and what stays custom, so the next deployment needs less custom work.

• You like owning a customer's result from the first call through rollout.
• You can start before the customer knows exactly what they need.
• You want to see people use what you built.

• You want a spec before you start.
• You want to go deep on one specialty and stay there.
• You'd rather not talk to customers. About a quarter of the job is time with them, and that time decides what you build.

We encourage all highly qualified candidates to apply, even if they don't meet every point below.

• 2+ years of eperience building software professionally, with real depth in at least one area: backend or full-stack engineering, data engineering, data science, or AI engineering. You need one you're strong in, and the appetite to work across the rest.
• Customer-facing delivery experience: consulting, forward-deployed, solutions, or implementation work where you sat with a client, worked out what they needed, and delivered it. You're an engineer who can run the customer conversation, then go build what came out of it.
• You can take a vague problem, ask good questions, and turn it into a plan someone will sign off on.
• You can explain a technical tradeoff to an engineer and to a VP of store operations.
• You learn unfamiliar systems quickly, whether that's a grocer's ERP, their merchandising tools, or their data warehouse.
• AI-native: You use AI tools to build more effectively and have shipped an AI-enabled product or workflow. You understand where these systems are useful, how they fail, and how to evaluate their quality.
• You move fast and finish what you start.
• You're comfortable traveling to customer sites regularly (~10–20%).

• Data engineering on a cloud data platform. We run on Databricks and Azure, with PySpark and dbt.
• LLM or agent systems shipped to production, with a way to measure their quality.
• Grocery, retail, or supply chain experience.
• Knowledge graphs, semantic layers, or retrieval systems in production.
• Experience leading other engineers through design reviews, standards, or mentorship.
• A background as a founder, a product manager, or in customer-facing sales or solutions.

Salary Range in U.S.: $156,060 - $211,140 + meaningful early-stage equity + benefits

Founded in 2017, Afresh is using AI to tackle the #1 solution to curb climate change: reducing food waste. By building AI specifically for the intricacies of grocery—from the fresh perimeter to the center store—we help grocers minimize waste and maximize sales.

Afresh sits at an incredible intersection of positive social impact, rocket ship financial growth, and cutting-edge technology. Our best-in-class AI research has been published in top journals, including ICML, and our investors include Al Gore’s Just Climate, former Whole Foods Market CEO Walter Robb, and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

Grocery is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values of proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility.

Here at Afresh, many of our employees work remotely provided that they reside in one of the following states: AL, AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MT, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, TX, WA, UT, VA, WI.