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Salary: USD 165,000 - 190,000 / annual
Manifold is an AI platform for life sciences that accelerates the development and deployment of life-changing medicines. The company helps global biopharma companies, academic research institutions, and health systems operate faster by making their data usable through AI-powered workflows—from target identification and clinical development to market access and precision medicine.
As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be the primary technical and scientific contact for customer accounts, working directly with scientists, clinicians, and researchers across biopharma, academic research, and health systems. You will own the technical and scientific delivery of Manifold's platform implementations, working alongside Implementation Managers, Product, and Account Management teams. You operate autonomously, thrive under ambiguity, and represent Manifold at the highest level in customer environments.
Key responsibilities include:
- Scoping and architecting end-to-end solutions on Manifold's platform, recommending whether problems need configuration, custom builds, or self-service approaches
- Configuring and implementing the platform for each customer, building data pipelines, agent configurations, process automation, and domain-specific tooling as needed
- Owning delivery from onboarding and pilot through production, working in customer environments with their data and driving engagements from ambiguous problems to working solutions
- Running discovery sessions, demos, and end-user training; supporting adoption post-launch
- Troubleshooting complex issues across infrastructure, data, and application layers
- Identifying repeatable patterns, playbooks, and tooling that accelerate future deployments
- Collaborating closely with Product and GTM teams, feeding customer insights back into the product roadmap
- Raising the bar for the team by sharing knowledge, documenting learnings, and helping new FDEs start further ahead
You will travel to customer sites as needed (approximately 10% travel).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role (or equivalent demonstrated impact) with deep expertise in at least one of: life science/clinical research, bioinformatics/genomics, data engineering/modeling, cloud infrastructure/software development, AI agents/evaluation, or regulated data environments (HIPAA, IRB, clinical governance)
- Scientific or clinical fluency; ability to hold peer-level conversations with researchers about their work
- Genuine interest in the science and what customers are trying to cure or understand
- Shipped Python and SQL into production; can point to systems you built that are still running
- Experience building AI into your workflow using Claude Code, Cursor, or similar agentic tools, with concrete examples of work you now take on that you couldn't before
- Ability to execute with velocity and ship working solutions into complex, real-world environments quickly
- Able to lead customer conversations independently with stakeholders from bench scientists to C-suite executives
- High agency with bias towards speed, pragmatism, and ownership; good judgment about when to build and when not to
- Bachelor's degree or higher in a computational, engineering, life science, or clinical field (or equivalent experience)
- Willing to travel to customer sites as needed (~10% travel)
Standing-out qualifications include experience with: clinical data structures (EHR, trial/registry data, OMOP, ICD, SNOMED), bioinformatics/genomics pipelines and file formats, data engineering with Airflow/dbt/Snowflake, AWS and infrastructure-as-code, backend APIs and third-party integrations, React or equivalent frontend, AI agent configuration and evaluation, and regulated data environments.
