The University OS: every student, course, dollar, and donor on one record, Risely's agents drafting in every office, and staff approving every move. Backed by Y Combinator.
About the role
You own the customer from the moment a contract is signed to the day the product is working inside their institution. Every layer of the stack that has to come together for that to happen is yours.
What they're looking for
- Strong across the stack. TypeScript, Python, React, Node, SQL. You debug a data pipeline, ship a frontend tweak, and design an API in the same day
- Fluent with data. Real institutional data is messy, partial, and inconsistent. You map it, clean it, reconcile it, and turn it into something the agents can use
- A shipper. A working version this week beats a perfect version next month. You move at the pace of the customer conversation and close loops fast
- Customer-fluent. You translate institutional pain into code, and code back into something the customer trusts
- AI-native. You orchestrate Claude Code agents alongside your own work. You have a real point of view on where agents add leverage and where humans still have to drive
More about this role
Forward Deployed Engineer
Comp: $120-180K total cash (incl. variable) plus founding-level equity
Risely is the AI workforce for higher education. We're growing rapidly amidst massive customer demnad.
We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own customer deployments end to end.
You own the customer from the moment a contract is signed to the day the product is working inside their institution. Every layer of the stack that has to come together for that to happen is yours.
Every university is different. Their systems are messy, their data is partial, their workflows live in people's heads. The job is to walk into that environment, figure out what is actually true, and ship working software against it. Sometimes that means a Salesforce integration. Sometimes it means a custom React dashboard for a dean. Sometimes it means rewriting an agent's workflow at 11pm because tomorrow's launch needs it. You do all of it.
The pace is hours and days. A deployment that takes a quarter elsewhere takes us weeks here, and you are the reason that's true.
- Customer deployments end to end. You own the kickoff, the discovery, the technical design, the build, the launch, and the first weeks of...
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