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Forward Deployed Software Engineer (AI Agents)

San Francisco, CA

About Pallet

Pallet is building AI Agents to transform the $12 trillion logistics industry, backed by $50M from investors including General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures. Our mission is to automate the physical economy by creating the most reliable intelligence infrastructure for logistics.

Our agents excel at handling complex logistics workflows—scheduling, data entry, and load management—for Fortune 500 companies. But this is only the beginning. Our vision is to be the go-to answer for AI in logistics: from proprietary models to a suite of tools that turn messy business rules into production-ready context for LLMs.

We're positioned to build the next $10B company in logistics. Join us and work alongside leaders from Google, DoorDash, YC, and more to shape the future of logistics tech.

About the Opportunity

We’re hiring one of our first Forward Deployed Software Engineers to embed directly with customers and deploy production AI agents inside some of the world’s largest logistics companies. You will sit alongside customer engineers and operations teams, reverse engineer legacy systems, design pragmatic integrations, and ship AI workflows into messy, real-world environments.

This is not a research or pure backend role. This is a hands-on deployment role focused on getting systems live, keeping them reliable, and owning real-world outcomes.

How You Will Make an Impact

  • Reverse engineer undocumented APIs, ERPs, TMS systems, and internal tools with minimal guidance.
  • Debug broken data pipelines, mismatched schemas, and flaky integrations in production environments.
  • Sit onsite with customer teams (~25% travel) to diagnose failures and ship fixes in real time.
  • Make pragmatic tradeoffs to get systems live under tight timelines.
  • Own customer go-lives end-to-end — from scoping to production stability.

Preferred Experience

  • 1–5 years of experience shipping and owning production systems in high-growth or early-stage environments
  • Strong experience integrating with third-party APIs, authentication systems, and event-driven workflows
  • Experience debugging distributed systems in production under real customer constraints
  • Comfortable working in ambiguous environments where documentation is incomplete, and requirements evolve during execution
  • Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders is a strong plus

This role is for you if:

  • You enjoy debugging messy real-world systems more than building pristine internal abstractions
  • You’re comfortable sitting with customers and figuring things out in ambiguous environments
  • You prefer shipping impact quickly over polishing perfect architectures

This role is likely not for you if:

  • You’re primarily interested in model research or pure ML experimentation
  • You prefer deeply scoped platform work without external customer interaction
  • You’re looking for a remote-first environment

Our Tech Stack

  • Backend: Node + TypeScript on Encore.dev. Event-driven design with message passing and queues. Hosted on GCP
  • Database: PostgreSQL
  • LLMs: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google for foundation models; fine-tuned models on Vertex AI
  • Browser Automation: Playwright
  • Frontend: Next.js + React + TypeScript. Hosted on Vercel
  • Observability: Datadog for logging and metrics

How We Work & What We Offer

  • Impact from Day One: Your first week might involve wiring a new integration into production or debugging a workflow that saves a customer hours. This isn't demo work—it's real implementations
  • Ownership & Autonomy: Propose ideas, whiteboard them, ship without layers of approvals. One standup at 10 am PST—primary focus is building, not meetings
  • Close-Knit Pods: We sit side by side, so questions get answered in minutes. Small PRs, fast iteration, observability-first
  • Culture: Catered lunch daily at 12 pm. Thursday boba runs. AI tools encouraged (Claude, Cursor)—but you must understand the architecture
  • Compensation: Salary and equity at 80th percentile, plus bonuses tied to customer go-lives. We promote from within—several teammates earned promotions in under a year

Interview Process

  1. Intro Chat with Recruiting - (30 mins)
  2. Technical Screen + Meet and Greet with an Engineer (60 mins)
  3. Executive Chat with Bizops Lead or CTO (30-45 mins)
  4. Final Interview: deep-dive technical and behavioral interviews (~4 hours)

Location

San Francisco: Since we're a small team building 0→1 products, we prefer candidates comfortable working in an in-office environment in San Francisco. We typically come into the office 5 days a week. Relocation assistance can be provided for interested candidates.

New York: Satellite office with Pallet employees across engineering, operations, and success—we're seeking to hire and grow out the team here. The team typically comes into the office 5 days a week. Relocation assistance is not provided for our New York office.

Travel: ~25% travel to customer locations

Compensation

The estimated salary range for this role is $160,000–$200,000, depending on experience and skill set. In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity, benefits, and growth opportunities. Final compensation will be determined based on a combination of factors, including experience, qualifications, and location.

Pallet is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

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