Forward-Deployed Engineer

Office Locations: Union Square, NYC (Hybrid); San Francisco (Hybrid); San José HQ (Hybrid)

Remote work: Tessera is a remote company. However, FDEs must have a home base at one of our office locations.

Relocation stipend: Provided

Travel: Required for customer engagements, with a wide variance per customer; ranging from 0-40%

About Tessera Labs

Tessera Labs has raised a 60M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to solve a class of problem that has never been attempted: software integration as software.

Our AI platform, Tessera Mosaic, is deployed across the systems of record of the world's largest corporations, automating the most complex manual business workflows with superhuman quality and speed. Tessera deploys frontier AI agents across SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and others, disrupting the business transformation industry previously monopolized by System Integrators (SIs).

Tessera is deployed at multibillion dollar companies driving various initiatives, including:
1) enterprise ERP migrations (these range from 8 to 9 figures in cost over multiple years)

2) post-M&A integrations;

3) multi-ERP intelligence—or, deploying the centralized brain for all system-of-record operations

4) New code and application development for complex, multi-ERP systems

Role Summary

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Tessera, you will be driving how global enterprises deploy AI at scale. You will own our most strategic customers and deployments, building and operationalizing AI automation in a category with no established playbook, in a role where outcomes are asymmetric and a single person can be decisive. You will be the technical arm to our pre-sales and post-sales engagement motions, embedding in Fortune 500 customers whose expectations were set by a world before AI. The solutions you build and deploy will replace mission-critical workflows in production that previously consumed thousands of human hours and added months or years to the timelines of billion-dollar projects.

Tessera FDEs are technical AI engineers with strong product intuitions. You will develop relationships with top decision-makers at the world's most influential companies, and you will rapidly learn the architectural intricacies and internal technical workings sustaining global corporations. You will be responsible for understanding customer requirements and building new systems at the frontier of our platform, and ultimately will operate with exceptional autonomy and ownership, and represent Tessera at the highest level.

As an FDE, you will be constantly asked to balance business tradeoffs: win enterprise revenue but protect the core roadmap; drive short-term success while preserving long-term leverage; go deep into customer workflows but don't become a consultant; ship fast but think about long-term reusability. Ultimately, your responsibility is to drive revenue, holding both short- and long-term horizons in mind simultaneously.

You will sit at the intersection of the GTM, Product, Engineering, and Center of Excellence (our functional ERP teams), owning customer engagements from pre-deployment to maturity and beyond. The most important question you will ask is not how to deploy, but rather, what to build and deploy: as a frontiersman, you will have the highest signal of how the product is moving and where it ought to go, and will be expected to help shape our product strategy.

This role is ideal for engineers and ex-founders who thrive under ambiguity and marry strong technical chops with intuitive people skills. Tessera FDEs are highly proactive problem-solvers, and have a keen ability to see around corners.

Responsibilities

• Write code and build production software and workflows on top of the Tessera Mosaic platform

• Conduct deep process discovery with customers, breaking down complex, ambiguous, cross-system problems into well-defined solutions

• Build lightweight prototypes or workflows that showcase Tessera’s AI agents in real enterprise scenarios

• Partner with GTM to clearly frame technical boundaries in sales engagements, producing technical collateral including Statements of Work

• Collaborate with Infra and Engineering to architect implementations that scale and work consistently across high-volume, business-critical processes

• Iterate closely with customers and cross-functional partners to drive adoption from pilot to full production

• Ensure that field signal from the customer is transmitted to the Product and Engineering teams, helping shape our product strategy

• Build long-term customer relationships and proactively identify new automation opportunities throughout engagements

• Lead training and workshop sessions at customer sites to train and upskill Tessera Mosaic users on the platform

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• 2+ years building software in a hands-on, customer-facing capacity — as a Forward-Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, founding/early engineer at a high-growth startup, or technical founder. You write production code and you work directly with customers; both are non-negotiable.

• Strong hands-on experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript

• Experience building production-grade AI systems. Experience at a frontier AI lab or a top AI application company is a strong signal.

• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Ability to operate effectively under ambiguity and fast-moving deployments

• An ownership mentality and willingness to do whatever it takes to get deployments over the line

• Willingness to travel to customer sites, primarily within the U.S.

• A track record of learning hard things fast and operating far outside your original lane

• Founder experience, or having owned an outcome end-to-end where the result was clearly attributable to you

Nice-To-Haves

• Exposure to enterprise platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake, MuleSoft, or similar systems

• Experience delivering technical presentations, demos, or PoCs to enterprise customers