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Forward Deployed Engineer

Remote, Portland ME, New York City NY, San Francisco CA

Hi! We're Forerunner.

We believe that climate adaptation is a necessity, not a luxury, and communities deserve access to powerful software that helps them plan for the future. The challenge of climate change is complex – it implicates how municipalities plan, manage capital, and communicate to both residents and higher levels of government. Forerunner helps local communities do these things better by empowering them to access, understand, and mobilize local-level flood risk data at scale.

About the role

As the first Forward Deployed Engineer at Forerunner, you'll pioneer this role while bridging the gap between our platform and client systems, creating seamless integrations that help customers fully leverage our solutions. Beyond just integration work, you'll be establishing best practices and defining processes for this function within our ecosystem. You'll work directly with government agencies to understand their technical needs, build custom integrations, and automate data workflows. Your work will enable communities to better manage and understand a variety of different environmental risks, such as fire and flood, and your work will provide permitting and grant management support to facilitate mitigation and prevention within the built environment against climate change.

What you'll do

Integration Development

  • Design and implement robust API integrations between Forerunner's platform and customer systems like permit management software (Accela, Laserfiche, Citizenserve)
  • Translate customer requirements into technical specifications and solutions that align with Forerunner's product roadmap
  • Create reusable, scalable integration frameworks that can be applied across multiple clients and systems
  • Build and maintain monitoring systems to ensure integrations function reliably
  • Develop and maintain automated tests for integration solutions to ensure reliability and stability

Data Management & Automation

  • Develop scripts and processes to automate the import and export of critical data for Customer Success and GIS teams
  • Design and implement data transformation pipelines to ensure consistency across systems
  • Create innovative solutions for complex data migration challenges
  • Build internal tools to improve efficiency for customer-facing teams

Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Work closely with the Forerunner platform engineering team to integrate your solutions into the main application
  • Collaborate with Product to understand Forerunner's core functionality, roadmap, and future goals for customer integrations
  • Partner with Customer Success, Sales, and GIS teams to deliver comprehensive solutions to clients
  • Document integration requirements and processes for both internal and external stakeholders
  • Support Sales and Customer Success with technical guidance during the sales and implementation process

Customer Technical Partnership

  • Collaborate with customers to understand their technical infrastructure and data workflows
  • Provide technical guidance to customers with varying levels of IT sophistication
  • Establish best practices for customer technical onboarding and integration
  • Help translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

What we're looking for

Required Skills

  • Experience with API design, implementation, and integration (REST services, different authentication protocols)
  • Strong JavaScript/TypeScript programming skills
  • Proficiency with Bash/shell scripting, Git/GitHub, and SQL (Postgres/MySQL)
  • Experience automating common tasks with reusable scripts
  • Ability to clearly document technical integrations and train users
  • Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Patient, customer-focused approach to problem-solving

Strong candidates may also have

  • Experience with batch job processing technologies (Airflow, AWS Batch)
  • Familiarity with AWS, Docker, GraphQL, Node.js, Express, SFTP, Postman
  • Background in geospatial technology (Mapbox, ESRI products, Leaflet)
  • Experience migrating ad-hoc scripts into standardized scripts within a larger platform
  • Exposure to architecture design for integration systems and batch job processing
  • Background in government software or permit management systems
  • Experience with test automation for integration solutions

Our team has a lot to offer.

Forerunner is an early-stage company with an interdisciplinary team. We are motivated by seemingly intractable problems and work hard to support one another.

We're mission-driven. Our mission orients our business strategy and pushes us to work with a sense of urgency. We're in the weeds -- our entire team spends time engaging with our partners in the field to better understand the real-world problems they face.

We're a small team. As a member of our growing team, you will quickly become an invaluable part of our organization and have a meaningful impact on our business and technical direction. We welcome unique perspectives and backgrounds. Your opinion matters and we hope you'll share it.

We're a remote-first organization, with offices in NYC, San Francisco, and Portland, ME. Many members of our team work remotely, but we have small offices in San Francisco, NYC, and Portland, ME. We offer schedule flexibility for all of our employees and ask for accountability in return.

We want you to be happy and healthy. Forerunner offers competitive compensation, health/vision/dental coverage, and commuter benefits. We also have a quarterly wellness reimbursement so that you can have flexibility in defining what "health" means to you.

The salary range for this position is $150,000-$180,000. This posting may span more than one career level. Compensation is determined based on a variety of factors, including an individual's skills, experience, qualifications, and working location.

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