---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Column'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-column-san-francisco-z6fxgkje7mce'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Column

- **Company:** Column
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/column/fad3b99d-89a6-4bbd-87bc-1f092ca1145f

## Job description

## About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity: We're a lean, experienced engineering team, and we're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer. You'll define what this role looks like at Column. As an FDE, you'll work with customers to understand their problems in depth and help them build new products on Column's APIs. What you learn in the field will feed directly into how our engineering team improves the platform. This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll write code, debug payment flows and design integrations, and you'll spend a lot of time on-site with customers. You'll get deep exposure to the full banking stack, from our APIs down to the Federal Reserve. This role is based in our Presidio office in San Francisco, with frequent travel to customer sites in the US and abroad. You will report directly to William, the CEO.

Read more about Life @ Column and our hiring process [here](https://www.notion.so/Hiring-at-Column-b8d9b2628317491989d4713091b6bb68?pvs=21). 🚀

What you'll do:

- Work directly with our partner’s engineering teams to design, build and launch products with Column's state-of-the-art banking stack
- Act as the technical owner for strategic customers from onboarding to launch, unblocking them on architecture, ledgering, reconciliation and edge cases in money movement
- Write production-quality code, that speeds up integrations and grows into reusable product
- Turn patterns from the field into product and platform improvements, working closely with engineering to shape our APIs, docs and developer experience
- Advise customers on how to build safe, compliant and resilient financial products in a regulated environment
- Represent Column in conversations with customer executives and engineering leaders, and build trusted, long-term relationships

What we're looking for:

- Strong engineering fundamentals, ideally with experience in backend systems, APIs or infrastructure
- Product thinking: you look past the immediate ask to the underlying problem and the best solution, for the customer and for Column
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. You can explain complex systems clearly to an engineer or an executive
- Executive presence and the confidence to lead high-stakes customer conversations
- Strong project management skills. You can run several customer engagements at once and keep each one moving
- A self-starter mindset. You're comfortable with ambiguity and with building process where none exists yet
- Experience with payments, banking or financial infrastructure is a plus
- Ideally fluent in either Spanish, French or Russian.

What you’ll get from us:

- 🏥 Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 100% covered for your dependents!
- 🐣 Comprehensive family planning and fertility benefits via partnership with Carrot, including reimbursement of up to $20,000 in qualified expenses
- 🏡 Up to $2,000 (post-tax) monthly rent subsidy for employees living within 2 miles of Column’s office
- 💳 FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses
- 📈 401k plan, including self-directed brokerage options
- 🌴 Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge
- 🧳 Sabbatical Program - Reach your 5-year anniversary to take up to 8 weeks of fully paid leave to rest, recharge, and pursue personal interest - with full salary and benefits
- 👶 100% paid parental leave, including 16 weeks for birth mothers, 12 weeks for primary caregivers, and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers
- 😇 Up to $4,500 in annual reimbursements for backup childcare
- 🍽️ Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees
- 🚆 Commuter benefits, including paid transportation to-and-from the office
- 🎉 Regular team building events, including annual offsite

Pay transparency: Compensation packages at Column include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers. The annual US base salary range for this role is $130,000-$250,000 + equity.

We look forward to hearing from you Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please reach out to accommodations@column.com.

We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify program [here](https://e-verify.gov).

## About Column

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Column is a nationally chartered bank built from the ground up to provide API-first banking infrastructure for developers and financial institutions, enabling them to build, move, and lend money at scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (founder-owned, profitable, bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021 (launched in 2022)
- **Founders**: William Hockey (CEO, co-founder of Plaid)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) / Financial infrastructure
- Target customers: Technology companies, US banks, international banks, real estate firms – primarily B2B and developer-facing
- Mission statement: To be the new backbone of financial services – a bank that is also a software company, purpose-built to power financial products for the next hundred years.

## Products & Services
- **Bank Accounts**: Programmable checking, savings, trust, subledger, clearing, and sweep accounts. Supports one or millions of account numbers per account, disposable accounts, all FDIC-insured.
- **Payments**: Direct connections to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House (RTP), Swift, and card networks. Supports ACH, wire, real-time payments, book transfers, and checks.
- **Card Programs**: Full-stack card issuing (debit, credit, unsecured, charge, secured). Customers can bring their own balance sheet or use Column’s.
- **Lending**: Credit origination, warehouse lines, forward flow facilities, and loan purchase programs – all API-accessible.
- **Debt Financing**: Infrastructure to fund new financial products at scale.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (100% founder and employee owned, profitable)
- **Key Metric**: Processes over **$4.5 trillion** in annual transaction volume (source: column.com)
- **Key Metric**: 136 employees as of mid-2025, with **+35.9% year-over-year headcount growth** (linkedin.com)
- **Notable Customers/Partners**: Mercury uses Column; direct connections to Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, Swift; No. 1 issuer of real-time payments in the US.
- **Growth Signals**: Profitable from early stage; global expansion into MENA region (hiring Emerging Markets Lead in Dubai); launching new banking products; strong uptime (99.999%).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Built from scratch**: No middleware or legacy software – Column built its own core, ledger, and data model.
- **Direct infrastructure**: Owns dedicated hardware connecting to Federal Reserve, TCH, and Swift, giving customers granular control and eliminating vendor bloat.
- **API-first design**: Every banking product (accounts, payments, cards, lending) is programmable via APIs.
- **Scale and reliability**: 99.999% uptime (highest of any bank), handles hundreds of billions monthly.
- **Founder-led and independent**: Profitable, employee-owned, and not beholden to external investors – allows long-term product focus.

## Strategic Focus
- **Global expansion**: Entering new geographic markets (MENA, Europe) with dedicated leads and local partnerships.
- **Product depth**: Scaling lending, card programs, and real-time payments; building risk analytics infrastructure to support growth safely.
- **Developer experience**: Continuing to invest in API tooling, documentation, and developer relations to attract more fintech and enterprise builders.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as "a bit weird" – not a standard tech or finance company. Emphasis on deep work, async interviews, minimal meetings, and high autonomy.
- **Team size**: Small and intentional (136 people, plans to stay lean). High impact per person – employees own core systems from day one.
- **Work model**: Mostly local in San Francisco Bay Area; open to remote for exceptional candidates. Some roles require travel (e.g., Strategic Partnerships).
- **Perks**: Employee-owned and profitable; focus on employee experience (fewer distractions, more building time); "We have fun" (column.com/company).
- **Hiring process**: Includes async take-home assessments to respect candidate time; emphasizes speed and expertise over lengthy interviews.

## Sources
1. [column.com](https://column.com/)
2. [column.com/company](https://column.com/company)
3. [column.com/careers](https://column.com/careers/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/column-bank](https://www.linkedin.com/company/column-bank)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/column](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/column)

## Other roles at Column

- [Deployment Strategist (Travel Heavy)](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-strategist-travel-heavy-column-san-francisco-dxtnmgt57x76) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Lead (Travel Heavy)](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-travel-heavy-column-san-francisco-etv3q7dhb3h9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Business Operations (Travel Heavy)](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-travel-heavy-column-san-francisco-r0zsdvmt878q) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer (Travel Heavy)](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-travel-heavy-column-san-francisco-v8n66pdryajc) — San Francisco, CA
- [AML Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/aml-analyst-column-united-states-mvdr60hv2j4h) — United States
- [Emerging Markets Lead – MENA (Arabic speaking)](https://feeny.ai/job/emerging-markets-lead-mena-arabic-speaking-column-dubai-0b5473qpt2mg) — Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-column-san-francisco-7fkxtwtbjpwr) — San Francisco, CA
- [Audit, Technology](https://feeny.ai/job/audit-technology-column-san-francisco-1451eqchwpwt) — San Francisco, CA
- [Legal Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/legal-operations-column-san-francisco-ygtpzj2q6h25) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Commercial Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-commercial-counsel-column-san-francisco-d52152az7s24) — San Francisco, CA