Forward Deployed Engineer (Short-term Contract)

As a member of the ShipBob Team, you will... 

• Grow with an Ownership Mindset: We champion continuous learning and proactive innovation. Team members are encouraged to identify challenges and take ownership of initiatives that drive merchant, company and personal growth. By tackling complex problems and exploring creative solutions, you won’t just follow a playbook, you’ll be actively building the future of ShipBob.
• Collaborate with Peers and Leaders Alike: ShipBob values collaboration and support, where team members and leaders alike are committed to helping each other succeed. We all set high standards and understand the importance of transparency at all levels. We’ve created an environment where trust, open communication, and mutual respect motivate our teams to reach new heights.
• Experience a High-Performance Culture and Clear Purpose: Our commitment to delivering results creates a goal-driven, high-performance culture where everyone is empowered to contribute to our mission with a clear understanding of their direct impact and accountability. We measure success in tangible ways, allowing each team member to see the positive outcomes of their work and celebrate shared victories.

Role type: Short-term contract

Role Description: 

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer at ShipBob, you'll embed directly within business teams to eliminate manual, repetitive, error-prone workflows. You'll map out how work really happens, identify automation opportunities, and rapidly build end-to-end solutions—from workflow discovery through production deployment.  

This is an AI-first engineering role where you'll design and deploy agentic workflows using code, APIs, and AI agents. You'll work on everything from micro-automations to large-scale AI-driven solutions, bridging the gap between operations and engineering while maintaining ShipBob's structured engineering principles.  

This role is ideal for a high-agency engineer who loves being close to real users and thrives in ambiguity. You iterate fast and ship working solutions quickly, with a proven ability to translate modern AI capabilities into meaningful operational outcomes while leveraging AI-assisted coding to operationalize automation at scale. 

You think like a founder, thrive in ambiguity, and are excited to challenge assumptions to deliver impactful solutions. 

What you’ll do: 

• Embed with operational teams to observe workflows, uncover root causes, and identify where automation and AI agents can meaningfully reduce friction.
• Break down complex, manual processes into clean system flows and technical requirements.
• Build AI agents and agentic workflows to automate repetitive tasks. 
• Own the full lifecycle: observe → prototype → validate with domain experts → harden → productionize. 
• Build reliable systems with logging, retries, monitoring, and guardrails for edge cases. 
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering when automations interface with core systems; operate independently for everything else. 
• Validate solutions with domain experts and iterate quickly based on feedback. 
• Document and publish reusable modules into our Automation Hub that accelerate future automation projects. 
• Drive fast iteration: ship small, gather feedback, and improve quickly. 

What you’ll bring to the table: 

• 1-3 years of software engineering experience, ideally in fast-paced SaaS, B2B platform, or high-growth startup environments. Exceptional new graduates with a strong portfolio of AI agents, workflow automation projects, or hackathon wins are encouraged to apply. 
• Strong full-stack engineering skills, including experience designing APIs and building end-to-end systems. 
• Demonstrated experience shipping AI-powered or automation-driven features into production, using LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and translating model outputs into real operational value. 
• Solid understanding of modern AI/LLM foundations such as, agent architectures and orchestration patterns, embedding models and retrieval pipelines and vector databases.  
• Hands-on experience with prompt engineering and building systems that combine AI inference with deterministic logic. 
• Ability to quickly learn operational domains and design lightweight, elegant solutions to real business problems. 
• Strong bias for action: you move fast, iterate quickly, and are comfortable validating ideas through working prototypes. 
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally with non-technical stakeholders. 
• Experience in the following: 
  • SQL or NoSQL databases. 
  • JSON for data interchange. 
  • RESTful API design and integration.
  • .NET for backend development. 
  • Python for AI/automation scripting. 
  • Frontend fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and modern frameworks like Vue.js or React. 
  • Familiarity with workflow automation platforms such as n8n, Zapier, or similar. 

We recognize that people come with a wealth of experience and talent beyond just the technical requirements of a job. If your experience is close to what you see listed here, please still consider applying. Diversity of experience and skills combined with passion is a key to innovation and excellence; therefore, we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply to our positions. 

About You: 

The work we do at ShipBob is both challenging and rigorous, which means our environment isn’t the right fit for everyone, and that’s okay. We welcome energetic high performers who thrive in a dynamic, collaborative, results-driven environment. We value individuals who embrace accountability and humility, push boundaries, and are motivated by challenging work. Every team member, no matter their role or tenure, is expected to roll up their sleeves and tackle the complex problems we face in today’s global supply chain. 

Learn more about our core values and how we perform at a high level in our day-to-day work on our Culture page (https://www.shipbob.com/careers/culture/).

About Us:  

ShipBob is a leading global supply chain and fulfillment technology platform designed for SMB and Mid-Market ecommerce merchants to provide them access to best-in-class capabilities and to deliver a delightful shopper experience. Merchants can outsource their entire fulfillment operations, utilize ShipBob’s proprietary warehouse management system for in-house fulfillment, or take advantage of a hybrid solution across ShipBob’s dozens of fulfillment center network in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. ShipBob is backed by leading investors like Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and is one of the fastest-growing tech companies headquartered in Chicago. 

ShipBob provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. 
 
This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. 

There is no deadline to apply for this position, as ShipBob accepts applications on an ongoing basis.