---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Encord'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-encord-new-york-1ks0mkdgmc9y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Encord

- **Company:** Encord
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/encord/2eedc8eb-00c2-4cbe-862e-5e22960f0dbf/application

**Skills:** Data integrations, APIs, Technical deployment, Product configuration, Startup experience

> The Forward Deployed Engineer owns the end-to-end deployment of the Encord platform for strategic customers, building data integrations and guiding users through onboarding. This role involves collaborating with product and commercial teams to drive adoption, communicate roadmap insights, and help establish the Forw...

## Job description

## About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

## The role

We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join our product engineering team. This is an engineering-first role: FDEs are the technical owners who take the Encord platform into our most strategic and advanced customer environments, working directly with clients' engineering teams to identify problems and design, build, and ship the solutions that solve them.

As an early member of the Forward Deployed team, you'll have an outsized impact on shaping a critical function for Encord and our customers, in a role that combines hands-on engineering with direct client ownership. You’ll do tough system design calls under real customer load, and customers will trust you to get their hardest integration and workflow problems actually solved. You’ll operate autonomously, defining your own path to a solution, managing client relationships directly, and feeding what you learn straight back into the product roadmap.

As an end-to-end owner of the deployment process, you will work across a variety of problems: technical engineering, operational excellence, and strategic product work. Expect to build data integrations, guide customers with best practices, demo the product, and contribute to the product roadmap.

## What you'll do

- Design and ship high-quality, production-grade code that integrates Encord into customers' most complex data and ML pipelines
- Own system design decisions for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, and speed
- Work directly with clients' engineering teams to diagnose problems, scope solutions, and ship fixes end-to-end
- Build data integrations and technical solutions that support customer onboarding, adoption, and scale at pace
- Communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to both engineering counterparts and non-technical stakeholders
- Operate with a high degree of autonomy: identify the right problem to solve, decide how to solve it, and see it through with minimal oversight
- Collaborate with product and engineering to feed customer insights back into the roadmap
- Help define and scale the Forward Deployed function as an early team member

Who we're looking for

- A strong software engineer with excellent system design instincts and a track record of shipping high-quality code, frequently and reliably
- An excellent problem-solver who can take an ambiguous customer situation, break it down, and design a technical solution from scratch
- A great communicator who is motivated by building customer relationships and solving customer problems
- Entrepreneurial and autonomous mind, energized by ambiguity and competing technical priorities, and able to manage client relationships and technical delivery without close supervision
- Ambitious and hardworking, with a track record of top-percentile performance in whatever environment you've been in, whether engineering, academia, business, or sport

## Experience requirements

- 3–8 years in a software engineering role; Python is a big plus
- Experience building or working with data integrations and APIs
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without being told what to do
- Prior experience at a high-growth startup is a plus

## Why Encord

- Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
- Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly
- Strong in-person culture: 4–5 days/week in our newly launched office
- Flexible PTO to fully recharge
- 18 paid vacation days in the U.S. plus federal holidays
- Annual learning & development budget
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe
- Bi-annual company offsites, twice-weekly team lunches, and monthly socials

## About Encord

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Encord provides the data infrastructure layer for physical AI, helping teams curate, annotate, evaluate, and manage multimodal training data for systems like autonomous vehicles, robotics, and smart infrastructure.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Venture-backed, $110M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with offices in New York, NY and London, UK)
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Ulrik Stig Hansen (CEO/Co-Founder), Eric Landau (Co-Founder & President)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure / Data annotation & curation for Physical AI (autonomous vehicles, robotics, world models, industrial automation)
- **Target customers**: Enterprise AI teams building multimodal, sensor-heavy AI systems (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission/purpose**: "Train and run AI on the right data" – solving the data quality bottleneck that prevents AI products from reaching production.

## Products & Services
- **Encord Platform**: End-to-end data management platform covering curation, annotation (native video, LiDAR, audio, text, sensor fusion), RLHF alignment, and model evaluation. API/SDK-first, zero data migration, runs on the customer’s cloud.
- **Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)**: Professional services for data collection and annotation, including in-field operators and teleoperation facilities matched to physical AI tasks.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $110.1M (as of 2026); annual revenue estimated at $5.5M (LinkedIn proxy, "Not publicly available" for official numbers)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: CRV, Y Combinator (W21 batch), and individual investors like Luc Vincent (former VP of AI at Meta). Customers include Toyota, Skydio, Maxar, and UiPath (UiPath achieved near 99% model accuracy and 10x dataset growth using Encord).
- **Growth Signals**: 139 employees (+74.3% YoY, +78 people); 300+ teams using the platform; operates in 7 countries; recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in the data annotation space; strong customer retention (e.g., UiPath 4x reduction in error rate).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Built for Physical AI**: Multimodal by design from the ground up – handles synchronized LiDAR, camera, radar, depth, force/torque, audio, and text in a single workflow.
- **Enterprise‑grade trust**: Zero data migration (data stays in customer cloud), API/SDK-first integration, label lineage and quality controls for production scale.
- **Proven at scale**: Used by leading autonomous vehicle, robotics, and enterprise AI teams; validated by public case studies (UiPath, Toyota, Skydio).

## Strategic Focus
- Deepen capabilities for world models, VLA (Vision-Language-Action) models, and robotic perception.
- Expand Data-as-a-Service offerings for physical AI data collection and annotation.
- Continue scaling the customer base across industrial, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, and smart infrastructure verticals.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Strong in-person culture” with hybrid/office‑first approach (San Francisco, New York, London). 45+ nationalities represented. Core values: “Builds with care + urgency” and “High agency”.
- **Compensation & Benefits**: Equity in a hyper‑growth startup; 25 days paid time off; private health insurance (UK/US); team lunch twice a week; monthly team events and bi‑annual offsites; cycle to work scheme; home & tech scheme; annual learning & development stipend; payroll giving scheme.
- **Visa Policy**: Case-by-case visa sponsorship, confirmed early in the recruiter screen.
- **Interview Process**: Typically 4–5 stages: recruiter screen, hiring manager conversation, skills‑based interview or take-home, and final panel. Recruiter walks candidates through specifics upfront.
- **Early‑career programs**: Commercial Associate program (GTM launchpad) and early‑career engineering/ML roles – no formal internship program but hires ambitious early‑career candidates.

## Sources
1. [encord.com – Careers page](https://encord.com/careers)
2. [encord.com – Homepage](https://encord.com/)
3. [encord.com – About page](https://encord.com/about-us/)
4. [linkedin.com – Encord company page](https://es.linkedin.com/company/encord-team)
5. [ycombinator.com – Encord jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/encord/jobs)

## Other roles at Encord

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- [Technical Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-encord-london-szj48frfp5g0) — London, United Kingdom
- [Quality Systems Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/quality-systems-lead-encord-london-3ryf0bcpedap) — London, United Kingdom
- [Learning Design Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/learning-design-lead-encord-san-francisco-6dss6rc19q72) — San Francisco, CA
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