Forward Deployed Engineer — Strala

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)
Compensation: $150,000 – $225,000 base + competitive equity
Visa Sponsorship: None available
Experience Level: 2+ years
Employment Type: Full-Time

Strala is an AI-native insurtech company rebuilding insurance claims infrastructure through agentic AI automation. The platform automates claims workflows including intake, fraud detection, adjudication support, and settlement operations.

Company traction:

• Multi-seven-figure ARR in under one year
• 50% month-over-month growth
• Series A-stage trajectory with two institutional funding rounds completed
• Backed by Founders Fund with investor exposure to early OpenAI, Cognition, and Scale AI

Team pedigree includes Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford, Optiver, AMD, Palantir, ICPC, and NeurIPS research backgrounds.

This is a true technical forward-deployed engineering role with direct product ownership. This is not implementation support. This is not solutions architecture. This is not post-sales integration. This is a hybrid engineering, client deployment, and product feedback role — and the FDE function is still being built with currently only one FDE on the team.

Core ownership includes:

• End-to-end multimodal AI deployment and production agent deployment for enterprise customers
• Direct senior stakeholder ownership, technical scoping, and go-live execution
• API integrations, client systems integration, agent design and iteration
• Prompt engineering, model integration, and rapid AI-assisted prototyping
• Customer-specific feature scoping and product evolution feedback
• Client relationship management and internal FDE playbook creation
• Scaling the FDE function from the ground up

• 2+ years combining technical depth and client ownership
• Target backgrounds: forward deployed engineering, agent engineering, growth engineering, founding engineer, or founder
• Technical: Python, APIs, cloud platforms, modern AI/ML tooling, LLM familiarity, prompt engineering, agentic AI concepts, AI-assisted coding workflows
• Strong executive client communication — ability to translate technical systems into business value
• Founder-mode ownership, high urgency, fast execution, and problem ownership
• Willingness to jump between coding and client calls in the same day
• SF onsite commitment

• Prior FDE experience from elite AI companies — Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale, Cognition
• Agent engineering or growth engineering background
• Backend + solutions hybrid background
• ICPC or NeurIPS pedigree
• Founder background

• Pure solutions engineers without backend depth
• Pure backend engineers without client ownership
• Career FDEs looking for mature structure
• Integration-only profiles

1. Application review
2. Cultural fit (multiple interviewers)
3. First technical interviews
4. Second technical interviews
5. Final strategy/ops interviews
6. Offer

• Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — please only apply if you can commit to this
• No visa sponsorship available

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Strala.