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Plain is a B2B SaaS platform redefining customer support and success for modern companies. Customers like Cursor, Vercel, and Granola use Plain to unify customer interactions, enable team collaboration, and leverage AI-powered workflows.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll own end-to-end customer deployments and integrations—the strategic, high-context implementations that don't fit self-serve. Your role bridges customer needs and product development: you diagnose problems, scope solutions, ship implementations, and decide which bespoke work should become core product features.
Key responsibilities include working directly with customers to understand requirements and deliver solutions; owning system design for deployments with tradeoffs between correctness, scale, and speed; communicating technical plans and tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders; collaborating with Sales, CX, Product, and core Engineering to inform the roadmap; and helping shape how the Forward Deployed function scales.
You're a full-stack engineer comfortable in modern React/TypeScript frontends and production-grade backends. You prototype quickly, learn from real usage, and prefer shipping and iterating over perfect upfront design. You have exceptional communication skills—running customer calls, turning vague asks into concrete scope, and documenting agreements clearly. You possess strong product sense: distinguishing what customers ask for from what they need, identifying which one-offs should become product, and having the judgment to decide what's worth building.
You own outcomes with minimal scaffolding in an early-stage, ambiguous environment. You stay calm under pressure—delays, bugs, and de-scoping conversations are normal—and can say yes to reasonable asks while pushing back appropriately.
The tech stack includes React and TypeScript (frontend), TypeScript and GraphQL (backend), AWS and Cloudflare (cloud), and multiple LLM providers. The role is hybrid: 3 days per week in the SF office, with early starts to align with the London team and quiet afternoons for focused work.
