Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Mecka in New York

Job description

• Application
• We're hiring a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to sit at the frontier with our most important customers — technical enough to be trusted directly with a sophisticated customer's engineering team, and the generalist who figures out what they need and owns how we deliver it. This is a mid-to-staff, high-autonomy role: less classic Sales Engineer, more Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineer, judged on ownership and delivery quality rather than a narrow job description.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical point of contact for a set of customers, credible enough to sit across from their engineering team and be trusted immediately.
• Understand what each customer is trying to accomplish, determine what data or delivery they need, and own how we build and ship it.
• Hold a strong customer support and SLA bar — respond fast, communicate clearly, close the loop on every delivery.
• Own the full delivery process end to end, not just your own piece of it, and find what's slow, fragile, or manual.
• Turn what you learn on one customer into durable improvements — tooling, process, standards — that make the next delivery faster and more reliable.
• Work directly with engineering, data, and operations teams to unblock delivery and escalate what needs to change upstream.
• Bring outside-in judgment back to the product and delivery systems — you're often the first to see where they break under real customer conditions.

Requirements

• Technical depth sufficient to earn credibility directly with a sophisticated customer's engineering team — not a demo-only or slide-based technical presence.
• Direct, hands-on experience owning a customer or partner relationship end-to-end, not just supporting one from behind a ticket queue.
• High agency and a strong generalist bent — comfortable moving across data, delivery process, and whatever else the problem needs, taking on problems beyond your defined scope without waiting to be asked.
• Startup experience, ideally as a founding or early engineer.
• A track record of improving how a team delivers, not just delivering yourself.

Skills

Required

• High agency
• Strong generalist bent
• Strong communication
• Customer support and SLA mindset
• Data infrastructure
• Robotics and embodied AI
• Customer engineering
• Delivery process

Benefits

• Our Compensation Philosophy
• Mecka uses industry benchmark data to establish compensation bands for all roles. The salary range listed for a position reflects the expected total wage range for the role. This includes base salary and on-target incentives, where applicable and may span multiple career levels. Final compensation is determined during the interview process based on factors such as experience, skills, scope, and role level. In addition to base salary, total rewards may include equity, health and wellness benefits, and other company programs. Full details will be shared during the interview process.
• Compensation is region specific and will potentially be different based on the location where the candidate is hired.