Padmi
Paragon logo
Paragon

AI agents · order processing automation

Founding Engineer

San Francisco Bay Area · Onsite$50k–$200k/yrPosted 7 days ago
Software engineeringStaff+Full Time
Apply at Paragon

Opens the source posting on ycombinator.com

Source description

About the role

View original

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with customers and the founding team to turn real industrial workflows into working end-to-end agents.

One day you may be mapping how an inside sales team handles RFQs. The next day you may be building a messy integration, improving product matching, writing evals for an agent, or talking to a 65 year old industry veteran to capture their knowledge.

What You’ll Do

  • Build AI agents for quote intake, order entry, product matching, pricing, inventory checks, and customer/vendor communication.

  • Integrate with messy real-world systems: Mainframe ERPs, CRMs, email inboxes, semi-broken APIs, scattered spreadsheets, etc.

  • Work directly with users to understand how work actually happens, not how a process doc says it happens.

  • Ship full-stack features across backend services, internal tools, customer-facing UI, and data pipelines.

  • Build learning loops so agents get more reliable over time.

  • Debug production issues in customer environments and turn one-off fixes into reusable product improvements.

You Might Be a Fit If

  • You are technical, completing a CS degree or similar, and love Claude Code/Codex etc with multiple agents running in parallel.

  • You like the idea of sitting next to a user and building product on the spot.

  • You have built projects using LLMs outside class: startups, hackathons, open-source, research, automation scripts, internal tools. Bonus if it has had some users. Extra bonus if those users yelled at you about something!

  • You can explain technical ideas to non-technical people and genuinely have fun doing it.

  • You are curious about industries other than tech.

Nice To Have

  • Experience with industrials or distribution, ERP systems, Outlook integrations

  • Prior customer-facing technical work: FDE, solutions engineering, implementation, consulting, founder, or freelance projects.

Why Join

  • Real ownership: your work will be used by customers and you will hear immediately if something does not work (and be expected to fix it).

  • Travel: you will be flying to customer sites, sitting with teams, and seeing your agents do work in real environments.

  • Exposure to the full startup loop: customer discovery, product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, deployment, support, and iteration.

  • A chance to build AI for an overlooked but massive part of the economy.