Forward Deployed

Forward Deployed Engineer — FDE

The role Palantir invented and OpenAI scaled — but for America's 33 million small businesses. You don't write decks. You sit with customers, map their workflows, and ship the software.

About Runook

Runook is the Forward Deployed Engineering company for every business that's been priced out of enterprise AI.

Wall Street banks have Palantir. Fortune 500s have OpenAI's Applied AI team. Every other business in America — your local CPA, your favorite Flushing dim sum spot, the freight broker shipping your Amazon order — has been priced out of AI. We're changing that.

Founded by engineers and operators, we run two product lines in parallel:

  1. Vertical AI products — AI systems we've shipped in production that customers use every day.
  2. An AI deployment service — we embed with traditional SMBs, map their workflows, and ship microservice-based automations that ingest information, analyze it, route notifications, and assign tasks — at 1/10th the cost of legacy consulting firms.

We've already replaced 8 internal headcount with AI workflows we built for ourselves. Now we're scaling that playbook to thousands of customers.

  • Stage: Pre-seed / early revenue
  • Team: Small, technical, bilingual (English + Mandarin), high-agency
  • Customers: NYC / NJ Chinese-American SMBs across logistics, accounting, real estate, beauty, healthcare, F&B

Our values

  • Ship before you slide-deck.
  • The customer's workflow is the spec.
  • "I don't know how" is fine; "I can't figure it out" isn't.
  • Bilingual fluency is a feature, not a footnote.

About the role

This is the role Palantir invented and OpenAI scaled. You're not a consultant — you actually build the software. You're not a pure engineer — you actually sit with the customer.

You'll lead 1–3 customer deployments at a time. Week 1 you're whiteboarding a restaurant chain's customer-service workflow. Week 2 you're prototyping the agent. Week 3 you're on-site at the customer's office watching their front-of-house team use it for the first time. Week 4 you're tuning the prompts and adding the integration the customer asked for during yesterday's lunch.

You're the bridge between "the customer's mess" and "shipped software that makes the customer money."

What you'll do

  • Run diagnostics (L3-P1) — go on-site to a customer's business, interview the owner and 2–3 key staff, map their current workflow, identify 3 highest-ROI AI opportunities, write the report.
  • Lead PoCs (L3-P2) — design and ship a 4-week proof-of-concept. You decide the stack (Coze / Dify / n8n / custom), you write the prompts, you wire up the integrations, you train the customer's team.
  • Lead enterprise deployments (L3-P3) — 12-week projects with real CRM / ERP / financial-system integration. You scope, you architect, you ship.
  • Be the customer's translator inside Runook — bring their pain back to product and engineering, push back on customers when they want the wrong thing, advocate for them when they need help.
  • Run customer success post-launch — monthly check-ins, quarterly NPS, expansion conversations.
  • Help build the FDE playbook itself — templates, frameworks, training materials — that future FDEs (and our Train-the-Trainer customers) can use.

What we look for

Must have

  • You can code. Not "I took CS 101" — you can build a working prototype yourself in a week. Bias is more important than language; if you're stronger in Python, Node, or no-code (n8n / Zapier / Coze / Dify) — show us what you've shipped.
  • Some customer-facing experience — could be a consulting internship, technical PM work, founding-engineer-at-a-side-project, helping run a family business, even tutoring or community organizing. We care that you can sit across from a non-technical person and figure out what they actually need.
  • Bilingual fluency (English + Mandarin). Non-negotiable for this role — half our customers run their business in Chinese.
  • Strong opinions, weakly held. You can argue with a freight broker about pricing and an LLM engineer about token budgets in the same hour.
  • Comfortable with ambiguity. Customer says "I want AI." You're the one who turns that into a scoped, shippable plan.

Nice to have

  • Background in one of our verticals (logistics, accounting, real estate, healthcare, F&B, beauty, e-commerce).
  • Experience at a firm with engineering DNA (Palantir, OpenAI Solutions, Salesforce Industry Cloud, IBM Garage, BCG Gamma, McKinsey QuantumBlack, ZS, etc.).
  • Built and sold a product to SMBs before.
  • Public speaking or teaching experience — you may co-teach L2 classes or do customer onboarding sessions.

You're a fit if

  • You're equally energized by writing a system prompt and explaining ROI to a 55-year-old restaurant owner who has never opened ChatGPT.
  • You think "PowerPoint deliverable" is a bug.
  • You'd rather ship a working v0.5 than design a perfect v1.0.
  • You enjoy showing up at someone's office and figuring out their business from the inside.

We don't care about

  • Whether you have a CS or MBA degree.
  • Big-firm pedigree. We care what you've actually delivered.
  • Years of experience. A high-agency operator with 1 year of doing things beats a 5-year ladder-climber for this role.

Why this role at Runook

  • This is the most leveraged role in the company. Every customer you land, you also create the playbook for the next 10 customers like them.
  • You'll get to do what FDEs at Palantir / OpenAI do — but with the autonomy and ownership of an early team member instead of cog #117.
  • For exceptional contributors: clear path to a full-time founding-team role and leadership positions (Head of Deployment, Head of Customer Success) as we grow.
  • The market reach is enormous: 33M US SMBs, less than 15% AI penetration. You're not fighting for scraps.

How we hire

Our process is fast (typically 1–2 weeks):

  1. Intro chat (30 min) — with a founder. We learn about you, you learn about us.
  2. Scoping exercise (~3 hours) — we give you a real customer engagement we've had recently. You write the diagnostic report and recommended PoC. We discuss together.
  3. Customer simulation interview (~2 hours, in-person preferred) — one of us plays the role of a real prospective customer. You run a discovery conversation and propose next steps.
  4. Team conversation (~1 hour) — meet 2 more people you'd work with.
  5. Offer.

We give detailed feedback within 5 business days of any stage. Always.

How to apply

Send the following to info@runook.com (or DM a founder on LinkedIn):

  1. Subject line: FDE — Your Name
  2. One paragraph: "Describe a time you took a vague problem from a non-technical person and turned it into something concrete and shipped. What was hard, what did you learn?"
  3. Resume or LinkedIn.
  4. Optional but appreciated: a link to something you've built or a writeup of a project you led.

We read every application. We respond within 7 days.

Equal opportunity

Runook is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire based on what you build, how you think, and how you treat people — not where you went to school, what you look like, or who you know. If you need accommodations in our interview process, just tell us — we'll figure it out together.