Founding FDE

Apply on YC · Original job listing

• Role: Engineering / Full stack
• Experience: Any (new grads ok)
• Visa: US citizen/visa only

Founding Forward Deployment Engineer

Operon is building the context layer for AI agents in industrial enterprise, the infrastructure that lets AI actually understand what's happening on a job site, in a facility, or across a fleet of equipment. We're four months old, YC-backed, and we're deploying our first product in the Process and Manufacturing Industry. This is not a polish-and-ship role. You'll be on the ground with customers, figuring out how our software fits into messy real-world workflows, and feeding that directly back into what we build.

What you’ll have

• Full ownership of projects.
• You will define what “Forward Deployed Engineering” means at Operon.

What You’ll Do

• Embed with customers to understand engineering workflows at the source.
• Ship production code across backend, frontend, data pipelines, and AI workflows.
• Translate ambiguous customer pain into durable product abstractions.
• Debug failures in real environments.
• Work directly with the founder on product, architecture, customer deployment, and technical strategy.

Source: Y Combinator job 96232. Listed on YC when retrieved 2026-11-02.