[Hiring] Forward Deployed Engineer @Harper

Role Description

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.

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.

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.

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.
• Customer Calls & Presales Support
  • Get in the room with enterprise buyers—leading technical discussions with developers, architects, and executive sponsors.
  • 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.
  • Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the relationship, guiding customers on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and long-term operations.
• 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.
  • Lean into Harper's opinionated, platform-first model—using what the platform provides rather than rebuilding it from scratch.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering to ensure custom solutions align with long-term platform direction.
• 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.
• Product Insight & Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Serve as the customer's voice inside Harper—gathering field insights, surfacing real-world gaps and customer patterns.
  • Partner with Sales, Professional Services, and Customer Success across the customer lifecycle.
  • Participate in post-engagement reviews, capture lessons learned, and mentor peers.
• 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.
• AI Fluency & Modern Engineering
  • AI is core to how Harper builds, sells, and delivers—and it's core to this role.
  • Use AI coding assistants fluently to build, deploy, and troubleshoot faster.
  • Apply agentic and automation workflows to accelerate repetitive engineering tasks.
  • Decompose ambiguous, open-ended technical problems and use AI as a force multiplier.
  • Hold a solid working understanding of modern AI concepts and their practical trade-offs.

Qualifications

• Deep enterprise experience with a consulting mindset (top priority).
• 8–10+ years of real-world experience, often including team or senior leadership.
• Genuinely customer-facing.
• A hands-on development background (language-agnostic).
• Platform-first instincts.
• Fluency with AI coding assistants and a working understanding of modern AI concepts.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership.
• Excellent communication skills.
• 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.