Forward Deployed Engineer
About Dust
We're creating a new AI operating system that has the potential to change the way companies operate. Our mission at Dust is to transform how work gets done by letting any team and employee shape the exact agents they need to accelerate their work.
With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We already are a core part of their jobs.
We're at an exciting stage of our journey and growing fast. We're serving great customers like Cursor, Clay, Whatnot, and Persona, and aim to 5x our growth by the end of 2026.
Dust is a Sequoia-backed company with an experienced and determined team of optimists (coming from companies like Stripe and OpenAI) that likes to focus on users, getting great things done by shipping fast, and doesn’t take itself too seriously while doing so.
Summary
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Dust, your primary role will be to build for users and accelerate their adoption of AI. This is a high-impact role that combines software engineering with solutions engineering and product development. You'll have a critical impact by equipping customers with the engineering resources, product creativity, and support they need to get the most value out of Dust. The best candidates are technical engineers with an entrepreneurial and customer-obsessed mindset.
While you will not be coding 100% of your time, you will frequently be writing production code and contributing directly to the Dust codebase. Expect to spend time as a hands-on software engineer alongside customer-facing responsibilities.
Our culture
Product-First: Unlike others focused on building foundation models, we're laser-focused on creating delightful product experiences with existing LLMs.
Small, High-Impact Team: Join a team of alumni from Stripe, Front, OpenAI, and other top tech companies. We're intentionally keeping our team small and mighty – every engineer has massive scope and impact.
Transparency & Collaboration: Our repository is open source, and we leverage serendipity between team members. We believe the best ideas emerge when the team shares information and insights openly.
Proactive Problem-Solving: If you see something broken, fix it—without waiting for permission. We don't wait for solutions - we create them.
Ship to Learn: We move fast and learn from real user feedback.
Intellectual Humility: We value strong convictions balanced with open-mindedness. Team members confidently advocate for their ideas while remaining receptive to new perspectives and evidence that might change their minds. If new data emerges, we adapt quickly.
What You'll Do
Build Technical Solutions & Drive Customer Outcomes
Write production-quality code to build custom integrations, APIs, and tooling for enterprise customers when off-the-shelf solutions aren't sufficient
Contribute features and improvements directly to the Dust platform based on customer requirements and field insights
Be the Voice of Our Users & Serve as a Critical Enabler
Act as a key cross-functional partner by collaborating with Sales to help onboard customers, and with Customer Success to drive account strategy and ensure users maximize the value of Dust
Help set our product roadmap by surfacing feedback and key insights from our customers, partnering with Design and Engineering to craft delightful experiences
Own End-to-End Delivery
Lead demo calls, effectively communicating Dust's value proposition to buyers and evaluators (e.g. security and compliance teams) with strong technical acumen and high emotional intelligence (EQ)
Be a trusted advisor to our most strategic customers, helping them set up their Dust workspace, data connections, AI assistants, and workflows
Identify and highlight successful use cases for Dust. Craft content that sets users up for success, enabling them to maximize the value Dust for their teams
Lead workshops and training sessions to demonstrate advanced features
Facilitate customer access to advanced use-cases through Dust's Developer platform and API
Requirements
Meaningful experience in a combination of technical and customer-facing roles (e.g. software engineering, solutions architect, implementation engineer)
An action-oriented and organised self-starter mindset who isn't afraid to get scrappy to solve customer issues
A strong work ethic and commitment to excellence
A deep interest in understanding customer needs and the desire to become an expert on Dust's product
Effective multitasking and prioritisation skills under pressure and in ambiguous situations across a wide variety of tasks
Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to achieve shared goals
A data-driven mindset that can interpret customer feedback and behaviour
A passion for technology, problem-solving, and a commitment to your customers' success
High technical aptitude, with an ability to work directly with engineers as well as business stakeholders. Experience with APIs, web development, and writing scripts to build internal tools is a plus. Familiarity with LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, Mistral or Gemini is highly desirable
Dust Engineering Salary Grid
Regarding compensation culture, we're going to lean towards Netflix's early philosophy: we are happy to review levels and compensation as early and as often as it makes sense to do so, not when the calendar says so.
Regarding expectations associated with levels, we're including a very broad definition of each level below. When attributing a level at hiring, the expectation is for you to perform comfortably at this level within your first year. We'll set up catch-up times throughout that first year to keep track of your progress and communicate clearly whether you're matching these expectations.
- Level I: Limited prior experience, learning the ropes
- Level II: Level I + Autonomy
- Level III: Level II + Rigorous dependability
- Level IV: Level III + Excellence
- Level V: Level IV + Leadership
- Level VI: Level V + Impact on company trajectory
*We can go higher for outstanding profiles.
Location
We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris and San Francisco, because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.
Why Dust
We're not building yet another enterprise SaaS tool. We’re creating an AI OS that will fundamentally change how companies operate. We believe existing AI models are powerful enough to have a tremendous impact on the world (and will keep getting better). The key is building the infrastructure so they have the right context, and building the best interfaces for humans to interact with them.
We have the unique opportunity to explore and shape the way humans interact with machines while building a product we use ourselves every day.
If you're excited about crafting products that reinvent B2B software and want to join a team that combines the best of startup culture with the backing of top-tier investors, we'd love to talk.
👋 Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.
___
Learn how we think and work.
Our product constitution: a story about our mission
Agents at Work - Latent Space podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu (2024)
LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI podcast with Stanislas Polu (2024)