Forward-Deployed Engineer

Sonzai is the relationship layer for consumer AI. Companies use our Relationship Layer to build agents that remember, evolve, and stay in character across thousands of sessions — companions, NPCs, avatars, tutors, brand voices, B2B2C deployments.

Forward-Deployed Engineers are the people who go in with those customers and ship. You'll sit inside one or two accounts at a time, learn their product cold, and design the agent loop end to end: memory shape, personality, retrieval, evaluation, the surface their users actually touch. You'll write production code, not slideware.

This is the closest seat to the customer outside the founders. What you learn comes back into the platform: the patterns you ship become primitives in the SDK; the bugs you hit become the next quarter's roadmap.

• End-to-end builds — Companions, characters, B2B2C deployments, white-label brand voices. You scope, architect, build, and ship — usually 4-12 weeks per engagement.
• Agent design — Memory model, personality dimensions, mood/relationship state, retrieval strategy, eval harness. The shape of the agent is your call.
• Customer integration — Their app, their backend, their CRM, their auth, their telemetry. You write the glue and own the production cutover.
• Production operations— When something breaks in front of real users, you're the one who fixes it. Then you bake the fix into the platform so the next FDE doesn't hit it.
• Feedback loop into the product — Every engagement ends with a written brief of what the SDK should absorb. You shape the roadmap by shipping.

• Strong full-stack engineer — comfortable shipping production TypeScript / Python, building APIs, wiring up Postgres / vector stores, deploying to real infrastructure.
• Hands-on with LLM applications — you've built something with the Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini SDKs that real users have touched. You understand context windows, tool use, evals, latency budgets.
• Customer-facing instincts — you can sit in a room with a founder or PM, hear what they actually want (vs. what they said), and translate it into a working system.
• Bias to ship — you'd rather have a focused first version in production this week than a perfect architecture in two months.
• Ownership — you treat the customer's problem as yours until it's solved, and you don't need a PM to tell you what's next.

• Experience with conversational AI, character / companion products, games (NPCs, dialogue), or social platforms.
• Background at an applied AI lab, FDE program (Palantir, OpenAI), or a YC-stage company shipping to enterprise.
• You've built and shipped your own consumer / agent side project — and can show it.
• Comfort with on-site travel (Singapore, US, EU) for kickoff and launch weeks.