https://www.harper.fast/
TL;DR As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll embed with customers and partners to build, deploy, and win the technical trust that lands and grows enterprise deals. Remote, low travel, high ownership. We are looking for someone who can build, understand how enterprises work, and walk into a room and talk to a CIO like a peer. You've spent years in the enterprise space - maybe leading teams, maybe sitting in our buyer's chair - and you're ready to get deeply hands-on again: closer to the code, closer to customers, and using AI tools to move fast. If that sounds like you, read on.
Role Overview
Forward Deployed Engineers are Harper's most trusted people in the field - highly technical, customer-facing engineers who embed in customer environments, drive real adoption and outcomes, and are trusted advisors when it's time to win the business.
This is a role for someone with deep, been-there-done-that enterprise experience and a consulting mindset. You'll build, deploy, and troubleshoot inside real customer environments, and you'll sit across from enterprise buyers and speak their language because you've been in their chair. You'll lean on modern AI tooling every day to move faster, and you'll help customers see how AI fits into their architecture.
We care far more that you can walk into a room with a CIO, architect, or operations lead and talk about their real problems with authenticity than we do about any single development framework or services delivery experience on your resume. We move fast, wear many hats, and value people who flex to get things done. You won't have a playbook for most things; instead you'll help write it.
And unlike most forward-deployed roles: this one is remote and doesn’t require constant travel.
If you're tired of the corporate grind and want to get your hands dirty again - closer to the code, closer to customers, using your experience where it counts - this is your stage.
Key Responsibilities
Customer Technical Delivery
- Partner closely with customers to understand technical requirements, business objectives, and operational constraints.
- Build, configure, customize, integrate, and deploy Harper's platform to meet unique customer workflows - directly within customer environments.
- Troubleshoot and resolve systems, data, integration, and operational issues during deployment and after go-live.
- Own customer outcomes end-to-end, working independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments while staying aligned with internal teams and partners.
What success looks like: Customers achieve measurable outcomes from their Harper implementations, with stable production workloads they can own independently.
Customer Calls & Presales Support
- Get in the room with enterprise buyers - leading technical discussions with developers, architects, and executive sponsors with the authenticity of someone who has sat in their seat.
- Support the sales cycle: run discovery, shape technical direction, and help prove Harper's value to technical and executive stakeholders.
- Take the lead in conversations and reframe when a proposed approach doesn't fit Harper's platform strategy - leaning into what the platform does and why it's the right call.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the relationship, guiding customers on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and long-term operations.
What success looks like: Harper earns the technical trust that wins and expands enterprise deals, and customers see a credible partner who understands their world.
Solution Engineering & Hands-On Development
- Write and ship production-quality code, scripts, APIs, and automation to extend Harper's capabilities on behalf of customers.
- Prototype custom functionality and deliver field-ready solutions that address immediate customer needs, validated in real customer environments.
- Lean into Harper's opinionated, platform-first model - using what the platform provides rather than rebuilding it from scratch - so customers get up and running fast.
- Collaborate with product and engineering to ensure custom solutions align with long-term platform direction.
What success looks like: Solutions are developed rapidly and map cleanly to a stable path to production, with technical objections resolved swiftly.
Partner Enablement & Co-Delivery
- Enable and upskill system integrators and technology partners to deliver Harper solutions independently and at scale.
- Co-deliver strategic engagements alongside partners, providing deep technical guidance and quality assurance.
- Build reusable delivery assets, reference architectures, and best practices that expand partner-led delivery capacity.
What success looks like: Partners are enabled to deliver Harper's value independently, expanding delivery capacity and Harper's reach.
Product Insight & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Serve as the customer's voice inside Harper - gathering field insights, surfacing real-world gaps and customer patterns, and bringing them to Product and Engineering with evidence and a clear point of view.
- Partner with Sales, Professional Services, and Customer Success across the customer lifecycle, and hand off cleanly for a smooth path to production.
- Participate in post-engagement reviews, capture lessons learned, and mentor peers to raise the delivery bar across the team.
What success looks like: Field insights directly influence product improvements and roadmap decisions, and the whole team delivers better over time.
Incident Support & On-Call
- Participate in on-call rotations to support platform reliability and availability.
- Provide engineering expertise during incidents and escalations, troubleshooting platform and infrastructure issues to minimize customer impact.
AI Fluency & Modern Engineering
AI is core to how Harper builds, sells, and delivers - and it's core to this role. Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to be fluent, hands-on users of AI tooling and conversant in the concepts behind it: able to accelerate their own work, demonstrate AI-enabled patterns to customers, and reason credibly about models and workflows in technical conversations.
AI-Assisted Coding & Productivity
- Use AI coding assistants fluently (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) to build, deploy, and troubleshoot faster - prompting effectively, reviewing generated code critically, and knowing when to trust versus verify output.
- Apply agentic and automation workflows to accelerate repetitive engineering, integration, and enablement tasks.
Problem Solving & Applied Reasoning
- Decompose ambiguous, open-ended technical problems and use AI as a force multiplier for research, design, and debugging - paired with sound engineering judgment.
- Rapidly get up to speed on unfamiliar systems, codebases, and customer domains by combining AI-assisted exploration with hands-on validation.
Understanding of Models, Concepts & Workflows
- Hold a solid working understanding of modern AI concepts - LLMs, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, context windows, tokens, agents, and tool use - and their practical trade-offs.
- Reason credibly with customers about model capabilities, limitations, cost/latency trade-offs, and how AI patterns integrate with Harper's data and platform architecture.
What success looks like: You demonstrably move faster with AI, and customers trust Harper's technical authority on how AI fits into their architecture.
Success in This Role Looks Like
- Customers achieve measurable outcomes from their Harper implementations and can operate independently.
- Harper earns the technical trust that wins and expands enterprise deals.
- Partners are enabled to deliver Harper's value independently, expanding delivery capacity and reach.
- Deployment timelines accelerate without compromising stability or adoption quality.
- Technical barriers are resolved swiftly, with solutions that scale beyond individual engagements.
- Feedback from the field directly influences product improvements and roadmap decisions.
What This Role Is Not
This role is intentionally different from many traditional engineering or delivery positions. To ensure clarity and alignment, it is important to understand what this role is not:
- Not a heads-down engineering role. We are not hiring an engineer who wants to rebuild everything from scratch. If your instinct is to replace the platform's logging, messaging, or defaults rather than build on them, this isn't the fit - and you don't need prior Node.js experience to succeed here.
- Not a role removed from customers. This is not a behind-the-scenes position. You work directly with customers and partners, leading technical conversations, navigating real-world constraints and trade-offs, and owning outcomes.
- Not a repeatable, template-driven delivery role. Each engagement is unique and requires adapting solutions to new technical, operational, and business contexts.
- Not traditional product engineering. You'll work outside sprint-based development structures, accountable for outcomes rather than feature delivery, with no separate QA team validating your work.
- Not a narrowly scoped function. The role spans problem framing, solution design, delivery, presales, partner enablement, and customer communication - comfort across technical, commercial, and interpersonal dimensions is required.
Qualifications
Required
- Deep enterprise experience with a consulting mindset (top priority). 8–10+ years of real-world experience, often including team or senior leadership. You've owned client outcomes, navigated ambiguity, and can speak to enterprise buyers with the authenticity of someone who has been in their chair.
- Genuinely customer-facing. You want to be on customer calls, lead the conversation, and do presales work - not just build behind the scenes.
- A hands-on development background (language-agnostic). You can build, script, and validate solutions and get into the terminal. You do not need prior Node.js experience - if you have a solid development foundation and the experience we're after, we'll teach you our stack.
- Platform-first instincts. You appreciate opinionated platforms and lean into what they do well, rather than reflexively rebuilding from scratch.
- Fluency with AI coding assistants and a working understanding of modern AI concepts (LLMs, RAG, embeddings, agents, and workflows), with the ability to apply them in real technical work.
- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership. You thrive in fast-moving, early-stage environments and hold yourself accountable for outcomes rather than tickets.
- Excellent communication skills. You can build trust with, and translate between, technical practitioners and business leaders.
- Willingness to participate in on-call rotations to support platform reliability.
Preferred
- Prior leadership or senior individual-contributor experience in an enterprise environment.
- Experience enabling and co-delivering with system integrators, channel, or technology partners.
- Hands-on experience with distributed systems, databases, APIs, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Experience with Harper or developer-focused / data infrastructure products.
Nice to Have
- Exposure to Node.js is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
- Familiarity with, or general understanding of, web performance and core web vitals.
Tools We Use
Node.js, GitHub, Docker, Postman, Grafana, Terminal (SSH, Bash), AI Coding Assistants, Google Workspaces, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WebEx, Rocketlane.
Why This Role Matters at Harper
Forward Deployed Engineers are a critical differentiator for Harper's customer outcomes. FDEs accelerate time to value, reduce delivery friction, and ensure Harper's platform is not just adopted technically but operationally embedded within customer organizations. As Harper scales through partnerships, FDEs multiply the company's impact - enabling partners to deliver at scale and turning complex technical challenges into measurable business value and strategic success stories.