Beacon acquires and grows essential businesses. With our centralized platform, we empower founders with the technology and expertise to better serve their customers. Backed by General Catalyst.
About the role
The doctrine: FDE, not consulting. An FDE delivers the outcome and compresses what they learned back into the platform, so the next deployment is cheaper. You hold the line: every engagement is scoped as a wedge with a written start, end, and deliverable; every deployment owes the platform a primitive, a playbook, or an agent workflow whose outcomes the platform can observe; every engagement leaves the portco's own engineers more capable.
What they're looking for
- Still a strong generalist engineer: comfortable in someone else's codebase within a day and has shipped LLM-native software in production with evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking. You can review an FDE's wedge and know whether it will compound
- Operator instincts. You read a P&L, you understand why a churn-save beats a feature launch this quarter, and you can sit across from a GM whose incentives are EBITDA-driven and land a deployment that borrows from the present to pay for the future
- Allocates ruthlessly and says so plainly. You have told a real business with a real GM that it is not where scarce engineering goes this quarter, kept the relationship, and been right
- Writes clearly and works transparently: async, in public channels, decisions documented where anyone can find them. At Beacon the wedge memo, the GM update, and the post-deployment retro are the work
- Bonus: Palantir-style FDE background, private equity or holdco operating exposure, time inside vertical SaaS, experience taking a portfolio of legacy stacks onto shared rails
- Our Values at Beacon Software
More about this role
Beacon is an AI transformation company. We own vertical market software businesses and we are rebuilding how they run and grow on one AI-native operating platform. Forward Deployed Engineers are where that platform meets reality. FDEs sit inside the pods with the vertical's product leader, own the customer, land the platform in real portco workflows, and carry each company's problems back to it. This is where our scarcest capacity is spent. We are hiring the leader who owns this function: the people, the doctrine, the allocation of capacity across pods, and the one number the model lives or dies on, labor per portco falling every quarter while the next deployment in a vertical gets faster than the last.
The doctrine: FDE, not consulting. An FDE delivers the outcome and compresses what they learned back into the platform, so the next deployment is cheaper. You hold the line: every engagement is scoped as a wedge with a written start, end, and deliverable; every deployment owes the platform a primitive, a playbook, or an agent workflow whose outcomes the platform can observe; every engagement leaves the portco's own engineers more capable. You are the person who notices when work is...
Browse similar: Startup jobs · San Francisco Bay Area