Forward Deployed Engineer (US)

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 jobs.

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 are at an exciting stage of our journey. We‘ve raised our Series A, expanded in the US, and hit the $1m and $2m ARR milestones in 2024; we aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2025.

Dust is a Sequoia-backed company with an experienced and determined team of optimists (coming from companies like Stripe or OpenAI) that like to focus on users, getting great things done by shipping fast, and doesn’t take itself too seriously while doing so.

Tldr;

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.

Responsibilities

You will be instrumental in ensuring the success of our customers by facilitating their access to advanced use-cases through Dust’s Developer platform and API. Your role will blend technology, product, and success to help us continuously enhance our product suite and to lay the foundations to our global ambitions.

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.

Some of these responsibilities will include:

• Build technical solutions and drive customer outcomes.
• Be the voice of our users and serve as a critical enabler.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of our product from the design of a solution to its implementation, including testing and deployment.
• 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.
• Act as a key cross-functional partner by collaborating with Sales to help onboard customers, and with Customer Success to drive account strategy and to 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.
• Lead demo calls, effectively communicating Dust's value proposition to buyers and evaluators (e.g. security and compliance teams). You must possess strong technical acumen and high emotional intelligence (EQ) to adapt explanations and presentations to the audience, ensuring clarity and engagement.
• Be a trusted advisor to our most strategic customers, helping them set up their Dust workspace, data connections, AI assistants, and workflows. You’ll help them graduate to advanced use cases enabling them to reach their goals faster, and leading to the expansion of our commercial relationships.
• 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.

Requirements

• Meaningful experience in a combination of technical and customer-facing roles (e.g. software engineering, solutions architect, implementation engineer).
• An action-oriented and organized 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 prioritization 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 behavior.
• 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.

Compensation And Benefits

$100,000 to $200,000 a year.

This salary range is the estimated base salary range. Base salaries are just one component of the total compensation package and are determined by a number of factors such as years of experience, expertise, qualifications and more. In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity packages that play a big part in recognizing you for the huge impact you will have on helping us achieve our mission. Please note, the salary range is a guideline that is subject to change without notice.

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris and San Francisco, valuing 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 that they have context and explore 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 working on 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.

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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 our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024