Meticulous · San Francisco
Forward Deployed Engineer, San Francisco
WHAT WE DO We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is ena...
WHAT WE DO
We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to
ship.
AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering
leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything
that comes after it.
We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else
on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the
world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz,
and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others.
We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of
Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more.
Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their
agents write code.
This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR.
If this excites you, come help us build it!
THE ROLE
THE FIRST FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER IN SAN FRANCISCO
As Meticulous's first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish our US FDE presence and help define how this
function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental
in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales.
You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures
and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise
and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of
Engineering the next.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what’s needed to make sure
Meticulous is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer
relationship:
- Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies
that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them.
- Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the
rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be
transformative for the customer you’re focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to
work at a new level of scale required by the customer.
- Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers)
at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the
two of you operate as a pod per account.
- Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers
workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development?
Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping
pair with core engineering team to make them happen.
- Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and
best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates
with 1+ years of experience.
- Highly agentic: you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when
things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive
- Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized
by customer collaboration
- Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. Expect to spend your first ~2 months in London embedded with
the core engineering team.
THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF…
- You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact
- You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow
- You expect regular hours and no travel - our team, customers, and investors span SF, London, and NYC
- You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems
YOU MAY LOOK LIKE…
- Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end
- Ex-founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit
and a clear path to scale
- Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work
- Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint
WHAT YOU'LL GAIN
HELP BUILD A NEW FUNCTION
As the first FDE in San Francisco and one of the earliest FDEs at Meticulous, you'll be instrumental in defining how this team
operates, from processes and tooling to how it scales. Clear path into leadership as the function grows.
EXCEPTIONAL GROWTH
You grow through a combination of the people you work with, and the experiences you’re exposed to. Within that context:
- Our philosophy is that density of talent is what matters; and so we’ve focused on keeping the team small but with exceptional
individuals. You’ll get to collaborate with world-class engineers who previously led 100+ person organizations at top
companies, and we expect you’ll find the team is beyond any you’ve worked in before, within big tech (Google, Meta, etc.) or
otherwise. This, combined with a focus on learning and growing together, means we’re able to learn from each other at rapid
pace.
- Beyond growing your skills through engineering and collaboration, the role involves spending a lot of time with engineering
leaders at the fastest growing tech companies and leading firms in the world. We’ve found this gives us a unique exposure to a
huge range of technologies, practices, techniques, codebases, architectures, cultures, learnings - what works, what doesn’t.
It’s a valuable bird eye view of collective learnings and experiences. These learnings normally take years or decades to build
up as you move between companies.
There are few startups that grow as fast as we do. You’ll be joining a small team on an exceptional trajectory. Through this comes
unique growth, but also unique network.
EXPAND YOUR NETWORK
Our investor network is one of the most active in tech - we'll use it to connect you with whoever helps you do your job better.
You’ll work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies, often at the highest levels.
Given the speed of growth, and desirability of the product amongst the leading enterprises, Meticulous provides the opportunity to
build a network of connections across the full span of the technology world.
SOLVE NOVEL PROBLEMS
Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design that few
engineers ever encounter - to help build something that changes the way software is developed.
WORLD-CLASS COMPENSATION
Base salary $200K-$400K plus significant equity, exceeding compensation at top technology companies and startups.
PERKS ♥️
- 🍲 Unlimited food & drinks in office - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever
snacks you want for the office.
- 💻 A setup you’ll love - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a $2.5k WFH
budget to make home just as good
- 🌴 Team offsites - we work and play hard, we’ve done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts
- 📚 Unlimited book budget - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want
to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator!
- + many more!
LIFE AT METICULOUS
We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of
this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future.
This role is on-site because we've found that the speed of iteration and depth of collaboration required for both customer success
and technical excellence happens best in person.