1001ai — Forward Deployed Engineer
Category: Forward Deployed | Priority: P0 | Headcount: 1
About the role
Drives the Forward Deployed Engineering motion: deploying existing products at new enterprise customers and embedding on-site to figure out what to build for new use cases. This posting is for the senior (P0) headcount.
1001ai is an early-stage startup (~12 people, mostly engineers) building "Scale AI meets Palantir"-style capabilities for heavy-infrastructure clients across aviation, sports, construction, and defense. The core engineering team is largely ex-Scale AI. Roles are based across London and the GCC (Qatar, UAE), with Qatar as the priority location; exceptional candidates can flex on location but should be open to international travel.
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.
- 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 (Senior, P0)
- 5+ years as a strong full-stack engineer with significant direct customer or stakeholder exposure.
- 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.
- Bonus: prior Forward Deployed / Solutions Engineering / Field Engineering experience at a Palantir-style company.
What we value across all engineering hires
- Comfortable in a high-ownership early-stage environment where scope is broad and changes quickly.
- Ships production systems; prior enterprise deployment experience is a major plus.
- Strong engineering judgement over knowledge of one exact tool or framework.
- Pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, security, and maintainability.
- Uses AI coding agents effectively to accelerate implementation but remains fully accountable for code quality, architecture, security, and maintainability.
- Comfortable with hybrid / on-prem / sovereign cloud enterprise deployments.
- A high-performance, "work hard" culture - intense but not toxic.