Forward Deployed Engineer

Certivo
Certivo

Software Engineering

Posted on Aug 23, 2026
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Location: Seattle, WA (hybrid) or Remote Team: Product Reports to: Head of Product

About Certivo

Certivo is an AI-native compliance platform for regulated supply chains. Manufacturers face a growing wall of regulatory requirements across materials, trade, cybersecurity, and sustainability, and the way most companies handle it has not changed in twenty years: spreadsheets, email chases, and a scramble when an auditor or a customs officer asks for proof.
Our AI engine, CORA, automates the work underneath. It collects evidence from suppliers, validates documents against regulatory frameworks, and generates audit-ready packages on demand. We are backed by Suffolk Technologies, Pioneer Square Labs, Mayfield, and Ralliant, and we work with global manufacturers across aerospace and defense, automotive, industrial equipment, electronics, and medical devices.

The Role

Compliance data is messy in ways that are specific to each customer. One manufacturer has forty thousand parts in a PLM system nobody has cleaned since 2014. Another has supplier declarations in six languages across three acquisitions. A third needs their bill of materials structure mapped to a framework in a way no other customer has asked for.
The platform handles the general case. Someone has to handle the specific one.
That is this role. You embed with a customer, understand their data and their compliance obligations in detail, and build what it takes to get them to value. Then you take what you learned and push it back into the product so the next customer does not need you as much.
You stay with the account across the full arc. You come in during late-stage deals to scope the technical reality, you own onboarding once the deal closes, and you remain the technical relationship as the account grows. The person who tells the customer what is possible is the same person who has to deliver it. That is deliberate.
You are on the Product team, not staffed out as a consultant. The work you do in the field is how we learn what to build.

How the Pod Works

Every customer gets a cross-functional pod rather than a handoff chain. A typical pod includes:
Account Manager who owns the relationship and commercial health
Forward Deployed Engineer (this role) who owns the technical solution
Data Engineers who handle pipelines, integrations, and data quality at scale
Compliance Engineers who own the regulatory logic and validate the evidence
You are the technical center of that group. When the customer's problem is unclear, you are the one who goes and finds out. When the answer requires building something, you build it or you scope it for the people who will.
The pod forms before the deal closes. You work with the account executive and our product lead during evaluation, then carry that context into delivery rather than receiving a handoff document and starting cold.

What You Will Do

Scope the deal before it closes
Join late-stage opportunities to understand what the customer actually has, including their systems, their data quality, and the gap between what they described and what exists
Run technical discovery and working sessions with customer engineering, IT, and compliance teams during evaluation
Support proof of concept work and technical evaluations alongside the account team and our product lead
Give an honest read on effort and risk before we commit, so onboarding timelines reflect the real data rather than the demo
Get customers to value
Own technical onboarding for your accounts, from initial data load through first audit-ready output
Map customer data, including bills of materials, supplier records, part hierarchies, and existing compliance documentation, into the platform
Build integrations with customer PLM, ERP, and procurement systems
Write the scripts, transformations, and configurations that make a specific customer's data work
Solve the problems nobody scoped
Diagnose why a customer's supplier response rate is low, or why extraction accuracy is off on their document set, and fix it
Build one-off tooling when it is the fastest path to customer value
Work directly with compliance engineers to translate a customer's specific regulatory obligations into platform configuration
Close the loop with product
Turn recurring customer-specific work into product requirements, so the third customer with the same problem does not need custom work
Bring field evidence into roadmap conversations, including what customers actually struggle with rather than what they say in a QBR
Partner with platform engineering on what should graduate from custom to core
Be the technical voice with the customer
Carry the technical relationship from evaluation through onboarding and into expansion, so the customer deals with one person who knows their history
Support security reviews and technical due diligence alongside the account team
Build enough trust that customers tell you about problems before they become escalations

What You Bring

Required
4+ years in a role where you wrote code to solve customer problems directly, whether as a forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, implementation engineer, data engineer, or a software engineer who spent real time with customers
Strong Python and SQL. You should be comfortable pulling apart a messy dataset and reshaping it without a ticket and a two-week turnaround
Experience with APIs and integrations, including the unglamorous parts like authentication, rate limits, retries, and reconciling records that do not match
Comfort with ambiguity. Much of this work starts with a customer describing a problem imprecisely
Genuine communication skill. You will sit with a VP of Quality who does not care about your architecture, and with an engineer who cares about nothing else
Helpful
Experience with PLM or ERP systems such as Teamcenter, Windchill, SAP, or Oracle, and how BOM and supplier data is actually structured in them
Manufacturing, supply chain, or regulatory compliance background
Familiarity with document extraction, OCR, or applied LLM systems, especially evaluating and improving accuracy
Experience at a company where you were early enough that the process did not exist yet
Our stack, which is Next.js, Prisma, Postgres on Aurora, Python services, and AWS

What Success Looks Like

First 90 days. You have taken a customer through technical onboarding and they are getting output they trust. You have joined at least one live deal to scope it. You know the platform well enough to know what it cannot yet do.
First 6 months. You own the technical relationship for several accounts from evaluation through delivery. At least one thing you built for a specific customer has become a product capability for everyone.
First 12 months. Pods run faster because of patterns you established, and onboarding timelines hold because the scoping was honest. When we look at a new opportunity, your read on what will be hard is the one people ask for.

Why This Role

Most implementation roles are downstream of product decisions somebody else made. This one is upstream. You will be closer to the actual compliance problem than anyone else in the company, and what you learn shapes what gets built.
You will also see the whole thing. Not one service, one team, or one quarter of a roadmap, but a customer's problem end to end, and whether we actually solved it.

Compensation and Benefits

Competitive salary and meaningful equity
Medical, dental, and vision coverage
Flexible PTO
Hybrid or remote, with the team based in Seattle
Travel to customer sites, roughly 10 to 20 percent

How to Apply

Send your resume and a short note to careers@certivo.com. Tell us about a time you built something for one customer that turned out to matter for many.
Certivo is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
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