--- title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Clutch' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-clutch-united-states-zq2nkf16cfm1' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-15' --- # Forward Deployed Engineer at Clutch - **Company:** Clutch - **Location:** United States - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-02 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/withclutch/8f1aa776-2c8a-4367-be4d-e25ba5e25fd9 ## Job description ## About the Role Clutch builds AI agents that work on behalf of credit unions. Emma, our collections agent, is live at five credit unions and handled 60,000+ member conversations in her first twelve weeks at one of them. Behind her is a growing portfolio: origination, fraud step-up, member (re)engagement and activation agents, all built on the same Agents Platform (TypeScript, NestJS, our own agent SDK, MCP, Temporal, promptfoo). As a Forward Deployed Engineer you are one of the two engineers on an agent. You take it from "sold" to "live and performing" at a specific credit union: you sit in the discovery sessions, you build the integrations to their core banking and loan systems, you author and tune the agent's behavior, you run the live tests with their staff, and you stay with it through go-live and the first weeks of production. When something needs a person in the room, you are the one who flies. You are based in the US and can be at a credit union in the Midwest or the Southeast within a day or two, not a week. This is a senior engineering role, not a solutions or support role. You write production code in our monorepo every week: integrations, modules, and the agents themselves (prompts, tools, evals), together with the other engineers on the pod. The difference from a traditional engineer is that you are on site more often, you make judgment calls in front of the customer, and you own the outcome. What you learn in the field flows straight back into the product: defaults, playbooks, and the platform capabilities the next agent will need. You build; our AI Operations Managers deliver. The pod (pod lead plus engineers) designs and builds each agent in a high-touch way with the first customers. Once the agent is defined and live, AI Ops coordinates the implementations, configuration and ongoing success at the next credit unions. You hand them something that works and a playbook to run it. ## About the Team You'll join the Agents team, a small, senior group operating as a startup inside Clutch: seven engineers, a dedicated AI product group, and AI sales specialists, working directly with some of the largest credit unions in the country. Every agent is staffed by a pair of engineers, one leaning toward the conversation and LLM side, one toward software and integrations, with a pod lead who owns the product day to day. There is no layer between you and the customer, and no layer between you and the platform team. The operating style is direct, written, and evidence-driven: BLUF updates, evals over opinions, business outcomes over ticket counts. The team is spread across Brazil, Argentina and the US and works async by default. Being on site is a tool we use at specific moments (kickoff, live testing, go-live), not a permanent posting. ## What You’ll Do Within 1 months, you will: - Ship your first production change to a live agent through the team's review process, and be able to explain how a member's call flows through the Agents Platform end to end - Learn one agent deeply: system prompt, tool contracts, orchestration triggers, compliance gates, and the implementation process from kickoff to go-live - Join at least one credit union implementation as the second engineer, including a live testing session with their staff - Map where the current implementation process loses time and where a default or a tool would have removed a round trip Within 3 months, you will: - Own the technical side of one credit union implementation end to end: core and LOS integration, agent configuration, testing, go-live, and the first weeks of production - Run the eval and tuning loop for your agent (golden transcripts, rubric judges, regression suite) and be trusted to change its behavior without a second engineer checking your work - Have completed at least two on-site visits and turned what you heard there into product decisions with your pod lead and PM - Contribute at least one reusable capability back to the Agents Platform that the next implementation will not have to rebuild Within 6 months, you will: - Have taken one net-new agent from sold to live at its first credit union, with data you can show the partner - Be the engineer credit union staff ask for by name when something in their deployment needs to change - Have written the implementation playbook for your agent well enough that the AI Ops team runs the second and third credit union without you - Be shaping what the next agents look like, because you have seen where the current ones break in the field ## What You’ll Bring In rough priority order. Prior LLM or ML experience is not required. We can ramp the agent skills; we cannot ramp senior engineering judgment. - 5+ years of software engineering in a fast-paced environment, preferably in SaaS and/or Fintech, with senior TypeScript and Node.js backend experience in a large codebase (NestJS, CQRS, schema-validated boundaries, dependency injection). We do not count years of AI experience; the field is too young for that to mean anything. We look at what you have shipped and how you reason about it - Integration and API engineering: secure service-to-service endpoints, third-party APIs, webhooks, and the patience to work with legacy banking systems that were not designed to be integrated - Security and auth judgment: OAuth and machine-to-machine auth, tenant-scoped access, secrets handling, no PII in logs. Our agents touch sensitive member data and operate under consumer-contact regulation - Customer presence: you can sit across from a VP of Collections, hear a request, and say "here is what I recommend and why", including when the answer is no. You are comfortable making calls in the room and owning them afterwards - Code-quality judgment under deadline pressure: you take on debt deliberately, name it, and pay it down, rather than gold-plating or leaving silent debt behind - Willingness to travel: roughly 20% on average, with one- to two-week stretches around kickoffs and go-lives. Based in the US, able to travel on short notice - Genuine appetite for LLM agents: eval discipline for non-deterministic systems, reading a system prompt like code, understanding that some decisions must never reach the model. Curiosity plus shipped work is enough; research depth is not required - Nice to have, explicitly not required: voice and telephony (LiveKit, Twilio), Temporal or event-driven orchestration, Python, core banking or LOS integration experience, credit union or banking domain knowledge What’s In It For You? - Remote Flexibility: Enjoy the freedom of remote work from anywhere, balancing life and career seamlessly. - Unforgettable Off-Sites: Twice a year, bond with colleagues in exciting destinations, fostering teamwork and fresh ideas. - Paid Time Off: Enjoy flexible PTO days yearly for relaxation and rejuvenation. - Stock Options: Joining us means having a stake in our success, so you'll receive stock options as part of your compensation package. - Home Office Setup: Create your ideal workspace with a dedicated budget for home office essentials. - Work Trip Budget: Grow personally and professionally with a budget for work-related trips and co-working. - Health Coverage: Prioritize your well-being with comprehensive health and dental insurance plans. ## About Us Clutch is a revolutionary vertical SaaS company, proudly backed by Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), aimed at revolutionizing the way Credit Unions engage and change the lives of their members. As a champion of financial well-being, we address the urgent need for affordable lending solutions in an era where the average American grapples with over $155,000 in household debt. Unlike traditional financial institutions, Clutch develops software to turn Credit Unions into FinTech lenders and leverage their balance sheets to responsibly lend to over 130M Americans. Our mission extends beyond mere financial transactions; we strive to fundamentally enhance the way credit unions interact with their members. By integrating cutting-edge technologies and user-centric designs, we help credit unions provide seamless digital experiences that are on par with leading tech companies. This approach not only preserves but revitalizes the longstanding tradition of community and member-focused service inherent to credit unions. Clutch is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our organization participates in E-Verify. Click [here](https://www.e-verify.gov/about-e-verify/what-is-e-verify) to learn about E-Verify. A Note About AI at Clutch We love AI. We use it often and encourage our team to creatively and effectively leverage AI tools in their work. If you join Clutch, we hope you'll bring the same enthusiasm for exploring how AI can amplify impact, productivity, and innovation. That said, during the interview process, we want to hear your thoughts. Please approach interviews without the use of AI tools—our goal is to get to know how you think, solve problems, and communicate. Once you're in the seat, bring on the prompts! ## About Clutch ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Clutch provides a unified digital origination platform for credit unions, modernizing lending, account opening, and member engagement. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2019 - **Founders**: Nicky Hinrichsen and Chris Coleman ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Financial Services / Fintech - **Target customers**: Credit unions (B2B, primarily mid-to-large sized institutions) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To give credit unions an unfair competitive edge by combining their member-first philosophy with the speed, intelligence, and design precision of leading fintechs. The company believes that "doing good and doing well aren’t opposites – they’re outcomes of alignment." ## Products & Services - **Unified Origination Platform**: A single, end-to-end platform for loans, deposits, and member engagement. It covers account opening, loan origination, decisioning, onboarding, and member support across all channels (online, in-branch, mobile). - **HAL (AI Lending Assistant)**: An AI-powered assistant available 24/7 to answer member questions, guide applications, and automate document collection and next steps. - **Emma (Collections Assistant)**: An AI assistant that automates outreach at scale to recover payments, freeing staff to focus on higher-value member interactions. - **Fastlane Decisioning**: An automated decisioning engine that uses a "Relationship Score" to reward existing members with personalized offers and smarter underwriting. - **Omnichannel Platform**: A unified system that delivers a consistent experience across online, in-branch, and phone channels, reducing in-branch intake from 25 minutes to 3. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Total Funding**: $106.0M (Series B of $65M in January 2025, Series A of $41M in April 2021, Seed Round in April 2020) - **Key Metric**: Over 150 credit unions rely on the platform; the company processes billions in applications annually. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: TruStage, Curql Collective (investors). CEO Nicky Hinrichsen serves on the advisory board of Suncoast Credit Union. - **Growth Signals**: 221 employees (+26.8% YoY), with a significant presence in Brazil (49% of workforce) and the US (33%). The company has expanded its platform from lending to a full origination ecosystem including deposits and business accounts. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep Credit Union Focus**: Unlike many fintechs that build for banks or chase exits, Clutch is exclusively built for and aligned with the credit union movement. It maintains its capital reserves with credit unions and is backed by industry-specific investors like TruStage and Curql Collective. - **Unified Platform**: A single, end-to-end origination ecosystem covering loans, deposits, and member engagement, which reduces complexity for credit unions compared to using multiple vendors. - **AI-Powered Efficiency**: Features like the HAL lending assistant and Emma collections assistant drive significant automation (90%+ IDV and fraud detection automation, 40% reduction in manual reviews). - **Proven Results**: Claims up to 2x increase in look-to-book ratios, 36% average cross-sell success rate, and a reduction of in-branch intake from 25 minutes to 3. ## Strategic Focus - **Deepening the Platform**: Expanding from lending into deposits, business accounts, and AI-powered member support to become the single operating system for credit union origination. - **AI Integration**: Embedding AI (HAL, Emma) across the entire member journey to automate workflows, improve decisioning, and personalize offers. - **Scaling Impact**: Growing the customer base (150+ credit unions) and team (200+ employees) while maintaining a focus on the credit union ecosystem. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-Driven Work**: The company is deeply aligned with the credit union movement, offering a chance to build technology that directly helps millions of people access fairer financial services. - **Remote-First Culture**: Clutch supports remote work with home office, phone, and wifi stipends. They also host company off-sites (e.g., in Brazil) and offer co-working support. - **Comprehensive Benefits**: 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision for employees and 80% for dependents; parental leave; flexible PTO; competitive pay with meaningful equity; annual learning stipend. - **Global Team**: With over 200 employees across the US and Latin America (notably Brazil), the company offers a diverse, international work environment. - **Engineering Culture**: The careers page emphasizes end-to-end ownership, complex problem-solving, and building systems that credit unions rely on. The engineering team is the largest department (48% of workforce). - **Core Values**: "Always Do Right," "Responsiveness Trumps Everything," "Build a Monument" (thinking in decades, not quarters), "Collectively We Thrive," and "Go Forth, Be Bold." ## Sources 1. [withclutch.com - About Us](https://www.withclutch.com/company/about-us/) 2. [withclutch.com - Product Page](https://www.withclutch.com/) 3. [withclutch.com - Careers](https://www.withclutch.com/company/careers/) 4. [LinkedIn - Clutch](https://www.linkedin.com/company/withclutch) 5. 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