---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Idler'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-idler-san-francisco-5dydyq60g5jp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Idler

- **Company:** Idler
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $125k–$400k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/idler/51c32607-8dd1-44fc-a0c4-8aa2ed91c0f4

## Job description

## ABOUT IDLER

idler is a frontier data research lab. We build the evals and environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to measure and train their models.

After raising a $9m seed round led by Paradigm, we spent the last year developing coding evals for top coding models you know and love. At the same time, we've expanded into other domains besides coding: RSI & Auto-Research, Law, Enterprise Business, Cybersecurity, and others. Now, we are facing more lab demand for our data than we can serve, and are rapidly scaling the team to grow the business.

Our approach to creating training data scales using technology, and all of our data products are built on a unified self-reinforcing platform that learns through experience.

You would be joining a close-knit team that has reached product market fit, and your work would directly help to multiply our revenue.

You can see some of our work here: https://idler.ai/collections

## ABOUT THE ROLE

Forward Deployed Engineers are heavily customer and partner-facing technical experts who own the entire system that turns our partners’ real work into evals & RL environments.

You’ll work directly with researchers at top AI labs to understand how they measure and train their models, identifying capability gaps and proposing what we should build next. You’ll establish and maintain partnerships with leaders of companies, civil institutions, and research labs, and you’ll build reusable, robust technical infrastructure to model entire organizations’ workflows to a high degree of precision.

This role combines hands-on technical work, customer & partner management, and rapid execution. You'll switch context frequently and stay ahead of issues before they become blockers. You're expected to employ sophisticated systems-level thinking, make sound judgment calls, and take ownership of outcomes.

In this role, you will:

- Own the end to end product pipeline — you will maintain a clear, complete model of customer demand and partnership opportunities, and you will directly shape our product roadmap.
- Manage both the technical AND relational sides of the customer and partner lifecycles — you will build the tooling you need to manage relationships successfully, while also advocating for customers’ and partners’ needs with the rest of the team.
- Build systems rather than one-off solutions — every customer or partner onboarding should be easier than the last because you built the tooling that made it so.

## What we value

- Customer & partner empathy — you enjoy the process of understanding what people want, and you come up with creative and repeatable ways to create win-win scenarios.
- Grit, coupled with good judgement — you’re comfortable operating in ambiguous, high-intensity environments. You’re independent and resourceful, but you know when you should ask for help before acting.
- Meticulous attention to detail — you would rather find and fix the problems in your work than let someone else discover them for you.
- Ownership mindset — you take responsibility for results, not just tasks.
- Global curiosity — you explore far beyond your scope, and you easily make connections between topics which are not obviously related.

## Requirements

- Strong engineering foundation from a rigorous technical environment.
- Advanced in at least one modern programming language (Python, TypeScript, or similar), with experience writing and debugging production systems.
- Extraordinary literacy, as evidenced by written and verbal communication. You can hold your own with senior researchers and non-technical executives alike.
- A track record of exceptional performance in whatever you've pursued — academic, athletic, professional, or entrepreneurial.
- A high tolerance for ambiguity, intensity, and sustained effort when the problem demands it.
- Willingness to travel.

You might excel if you…

- Have worked at an early-stage startup, or in a role where you operated well beyond your job description.
- Learn quickly by being embedded in challenging, real-world environments.
- Have thought seriously about starting your own company.

## DETAILS

- In-person in San Francisco
- Competitive salary + meaningful equity
- Free meals in office
- Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year
- Relocation assistance
- Small, ambitious team

This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We're a tight-knit founding team and we play to win. Join us if you like to win too.

## About Idler

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Idler builds reinforcement learning environments that teach AI models to code at expert human levels, using real-world coding scenarios to prepare them for production challenges.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed, YC Summer 2025)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Nalu Concepcion, Ivan Chub, Tony Goss

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Reinforcement Learning
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, research organizations, and enterprises developing large language models (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission**: To create the training data layer for frontier AI by building environments that teach models to code like the top 0.01% of engineers.

## Products & Services
- **Reinforcement Learning Training Environments**: A platform that generates synthetic coding challenges and real-world scenarios for training AI models via reinforcement learning. These environments are designed to teach models complex, production-level coding skills.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metrics**:
  - **Total Funding**: $500,000 (Pre-Seed round led by Y Combinator, October 2025)
  - **Annual Revenue**: Estimated at $22.5M (LinkedIn estimate; likely a projection or early revenue figure for a 2025 startup)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead investor), Harj Taggar (primary partner)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Secured a multimillion-dollar contract with a leading foundation lab (largest they have issued to date)
  - Rapidly scaling team (currently 13-14 employees) to meet demand that outpaces delivery capacity
  - Active hiring for Software Engineers, Staff Software Engineer, and Special Projects Operator roles

## Competitive Advantages
- **Focus on Real-World Scenarios**: Unlike generic coding datasets, Idler’s environments simulate the complex, messy challenges models face in production, making trained models more capable and reliable.
- **Early Frontier Lab Contracts**: Already landed multimillion-dollar deals with top AI labs, validating demand and providing real-world feedback loops.
- **Y Combinator Backing**: Part of the prestigious Summer 2025 batch, providing network, credibility, and early-stage support.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale Training Data Production**: Rapidly expand capacity to build environments for frontier AI models, aiming to become the default training data layer for reinforcement learning in coding.
- **Hire Top Engineering Talent**: Grow the team (currently ~13) with senior engineers and operators who can move fast and think deeply about training data quality.
- **Maintain In-Office Culture**: All employees work in person at the Dogpatch office in San Francisco to foster tight collaboration and rapid iteration.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Tight-knit founding team that moves quickly, thinks deeply about data, and “plays to win.” Emphasis on high agency and ownership.
- **Work Environment**: 100% in-office at the Dogpatch neighborhood in San Francisco. No remote/hybrid option.
- **Perks & Benefits**:
  - Competitive salary ($140K–$400K depending on role) plus equity (0.05%–1.0%)
  - Free daily meals, snacks, and drinks
  - Health insurance, 401(K), generous PTO, paid holidays
  - Wellness initiatives and company-sponsored outings
  - Office perks including on-site workspace
- **Engineering Culture**: Uses modern stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Honeycomb, GitHub). Emphasis on building high-quality training data infrastructure.

## Sources
1. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/idler)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/idler)
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/idlersai)
4. [ycombinator.com/jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/idler/jobs)
5. [builtinsf.com](https://www.builtinsf.com/company/idlersai)

## Other roles at Idler

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- [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-idler-san-francisco-safkzyj6b8y6) — San Francisco, CA
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