Forward Deployed Engineer

About Leptex

Leptex is building personal intelligence for everyday people. Our mission is to democratize AI: make it something everyone can use, understand, and control. Each person should decide how their data is used, what their AI can do, and which decisions remain theirs. We start with farmers and independent business owners, building alongside them and learning from their daily work. Join us to bring that power to more people.

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you work directly with business owners, helping each customer move from an initial conversation to a system they use every day. For each customer, you act as the engineer, product manager, and salesperson: you learn how the business works, set up its personal intelligence, verify that it answers reliably, and support the customer until they are actively using it. What you learn from working with customers informs the product. This is a full-time remote role, and you must live and work in the United States.

Our first customers are farms. You work with owners on products, supply, payment, pickup, and after-sales service, and turn recurring onboarding steps into reusable product capabilities. You check whether the farm's buyers understand the terms and whether requests that need human attention reach the right person.

Compensation: Cash compensation has not yet been determined. Compensation and any applicable benefits will be set out in a written agreement before work begins.

What you'll do

• Customer development: Find businesses the product can serve, demonstrate its capabilities using their own materials, and carry the conversation through to a signed agreement.
• Requirements: Find out how the customer runs the business, what they know, and which matters only they may decide, then document these as clear requirements.
• Personal intelligence development: Use Leptex's platform and tools to set up the customer's workflows for business knowledge, conversations with buyers, and human review.
• System integration: Connect those workflows to the tools the customer already uses, stating the purpose and the access scope of each connection.
• Prototypes and iteration: Build a prototype for a specific problem, test it with the customer, improve it based on their feedback, and expand its scope step by step.
• Quality evaluation: Check that answers are accurate, knowledge is current, handoffs to a person work reliably, and costs are reasonable. Identify problems in the customer's actual working environment and use the evidence to improve the system.
• Technical guidance: Make sure customers understand what the system does, what information it can see, which steps need review, and where its limits are, so they can decide for themselves how to use it.
• Delivery and feedback: Set milestones and deliver on time. Identify recurring problems and turn what you learn into product improvements that serve more customers.
• Product planning: Decide what to build next based on what you learn from working with customers, set priorities, and decline requests that do not help them.
• End-to-end ownership: There is no separate product team or engineering team behind you. For each customer, you are responsible for everything from the first conversation to a system that keeps working.

What we're looking for

• AI knowledge: You understand the core concepts of artificial intelligence, what large language models can and cannot do, and how to write prompts.
• AI systems: You are familiar with a range of AI agent frameworks and systems and can quickly learn to use new ones.
• AI safety: You understand common AI risks, know how to limit what a system can see and do, and can ensure a timely handoff to a person when something goes wrong.
• Education: No degree or field of study is required. We welcome people from every discipline; what matters is that you can get the work done with AI tools.
• Experience: No prior work experience is required, but you must be able to use AI tools. We assess these skills through existing work samples or a brief, job-related exercise using a simulated customer scenario. We do not ask applicants to perform unpaid work for Leptex or its customers.
• Programming skills: You are familiar with a range of programming languages and can use coding agents to write clean, efficient, and maintainable code.
• System design: You understand how software systems run and connect, and you are familiar with the major cloud platforms. If you have used only one platform, you can learn others quickly. You understand the design of both conventional software systems and AI systems.
• Product management: You can define requirements, set priorities, keep work on schedule, and take a product from an idea to something customers use every day.
• Sales and communication: You can work directly with customers, understand what they need, explain solutions clearly, and help them adopt the product.
• Independent thinking: We are a newly founded company, and this role combines engineering, product, and sales. It is neither a research role nor a role focused only on coding. You work independently and are responsible for your own reasoning. You make decisions based on evidence and use your own AI tools to support your work. You take on the tasks needed to solve real customer problems.

Equal opportunity

Leptex is an equal opportunity employer. We base hiring decisions on job-related skills and qualifications. We do not discriminate against applicants or employees based on race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, write to careers@leptex.com.

We do not use AI to screen or assess applicants. A person reads every application. We use application materials to assess your suitability for a role, communicate with you about recruitment, and meet applicable legal and recordkeeping obligations. We retain them only for as long as needed for these purposes, including any required retention period or legal hold, and then delete them. For questions or requests about your application data, contact privacy@leptex.com.