1001 AI — Forward Deployed Engineer (Mid, P1)
About 1001 AI: AI-native OS for MENA heavy industries (aviation, construction, ports, energy). Lux Capital / General Catalyst / CIV backed. Engineering team mostly ex-Scale AI / Palantir. Locations: London + Doha + Dubai + Abu Dhabi.
One-line pitch: Forward Deployed Engineering motion at the mid-level — eager to spend significant time on customer sites in person, ships software with the customer in the room.
Responsibilities:
- For existing products: take what we have and deploy it at additional enterprise customers
- For new use cases: embed on-site with the customer, learn their operations, and figure out what we should build
- Talk to clients, understand their domain, and translate it into engineering work
- Able to distinguish between a one-off customer request and something that should become reusable product
- Write crisp specs for features that go into the platform
- Carry deployments end-to-end — from kickoff through go-live
Requirements:
- 2–4 years as a full-stack engineer
- Eager to spend significant time on customer sites
- Able to run a deployment of an existing product at a new customer end-to-end
- Comfortable embedding directly with enterprise customers in person
- Strong full-stack capability (TypeScript / React + Python or Node) — ships working software with the customer in the room
- High customer empathy; equally comfortable in a customer boardroom and a terminal
- Comfortable with ambiguity and frequent travel to customer sites in the Gulf and beyond
- Uses AI coding agents effectively but remains fully accountable for code quality
Bonus:
- Prior Forward Deployed / Solutions Engineering / Field Engineering experience at a Palantir-style company
- AI-native product exposure
Pedigree priority: Palantir FDE, Scale AI FDE, Anthropic FDE / Applied AI, OpenAI Solutions, Anduril FDE, Cohere Solutions, top YC AI-native startups. Top UK uni preferred at mid level (Imperial / Oxford / Cambridge / KCL / UCL / Edinburgh / Warwick / Bath / St Andrews) OR strong international equivalent (CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, NCKU, Tsinghua).
Exclusions: ad-tech-only startups, generic bank SWE roles without customer exposure, junior titles.
Locations: London, Doha, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi — frequent travel to Gulf customer sites expected.