Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

We're a stealth holding company acquiring and operating software businesses in overlooked, mission-critical industries - the systems that run the physical economy but have been ignored by Silicon Valley. We're rebuilding them as AI-native from the inside out.

We're small, well-capitalized, and moving fast. This is not a research lab. This is a build shop with real customers, real revenue, and real P&Ls.

You will be the AI engineer. You'll own:

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  Ship a working domain-specific agent into a live customer environment in your first 30 days

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  Build the eval infrastructure that lets us measure whether these agents are actually replacing human workflows (not vibes)

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  Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier + open models depending on the economics of each vertical

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  Sit with customers. Watch them work. Instrument their workflows. Rebuild them.

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  Write the AI engineering playbook that every future portfolio company inherits on day one

• You are a builder first. You've shipped things people actually use. Alone or as the clear technical lead.

• You are a forward-deployed engineer. You'll fly to a customer site, sit in their office, and understand the business before you write a line of code.

• You've been called a 10x engineer and it wasn't in a self-review.

• You have demonstrated experience building and deploying production-grade AI/LLM harnesses that connect models to customer data, tools, APIs, and business workflows, with appropriate evaluation, observability, guardrails, and failure handling.

• You have strong opinions about when to fine-tune vs. prompt vs. RAG vs. agent vs harness and you can defend them with numbers.

• You've built with the current frontier stack (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open models) in production, not just in a Jupyter notebook.

• You are allergic to slide decks and comfortable with ambiguity, small teams, and unglamorous industries.

• A research role. We ship.

• A management role. You build.

• A "Head of AI" title for LinkedIn. You will be in the codebase daily.

• A place for people who need process, roadmaps handed to them, or a 20-person team to feel productive.

We are focused on building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you’re excited about this role, but do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above, we encourage you to apply.

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Atomic is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local law.

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