Amari AI — Founding Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA Compensation: $180,000–$260,000 + competitive equity (specific % not stated) Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: None available Reports to: Not specified (works directly with founders and engineering leadership)

Global trade still runs on outdated, manual workflows. Amari builds AI agents for the logistics industry — software that reads shipment documents, classifies goods, and generates compliant customs filings with minimal manual input, helping logistics teams keep pace with changing trade regulations and clear shipments faster with fewer errors. The product works alongside humans, automating document-heavy tasks. Amari is past the zero-to-one phase with clear product-market fit, already deployed with customers processing meaningful operational volume. The deeply technical team comes from Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, top schools, and AI research labs.

Founded: Not specified | Team size: Not specified | Total funding: $4.5M (First Round Capital, Pear VC) Industry: AI · Logistics · Customs brokerage automation Website: amari.ai Office: San Francisco, CA

• Founding-level ownership and equity: First FDE on the team — you set the bar for customer-facing engineering.
• Technical owner of strategic accounts: Own the company's most important enterprise customer relationships end to end.
• Direct line to leadership: Work directly with founders and engineering leadership; title and impact match responsibility.

• No intake call summary / transcript present on this role page.

Amari is hiring its first Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical owner of the company's deepest enterprise customer relationships — living inside the workflows of logistics companies, writing the code, designing the integrations, and shipping the customer-facing capabilities that make Amari real in production. As the first FDE, this person defines what good looks like: how the team scopes, ships, tests, and turns customer-facing work into broader platform leverage.

• →Own strategic enterprise accounts end to end — run technical discovery, design the integration architecture, build customer-facing capabilities, and stay deeply engaged through go-live and beyond.
• →Ship customer-facing engineering — production code touching document-heavy workflows, regulatory filing surfaces, customer integrations, and AI-driven extraction pipelines. Your code runs against real shipments.
• →Build capabilities that strengthen the broader platform — bring learnings back to the core platform team so every customer gets a stronger product.
• →Set the bar — define standards for testing, staging discipline, deployment safety, and code quality on customer-facing surfaces; raise the level of engineers working on accounts.

Tech stack: Python, document processing pipelines, modern AI/LLM infrastructure, integrations.

• 5-9 years engineering, senior IC or tech lead
• Prior FDE or Solutions Engineering at AI or enterprise software company
• Strong Python, document processing, LLM infra fluency
• Comfortable with Director-level stakeholders
• SF in-person, founding-seat ownership

• Logistics, shipping, customs, freight, or supply chain domain experience. Significant plus per Amari.
• Demonstrated comfort owning enterprise accounts end to end: technical discovery, integration architecture, go-live, and post-go-live support.

• Preference for deep work without customer surface area
• Need for clean specs and narrowly bounded scope
• Discomfort with unscheduled customer calls for production issues
• Requirement for extensive process to be productive

Salary$180,000–$260,000EquityCompetitive (specific % not stated)On-site policySF in-personVisa sponsorshipNone availableEmployment typeFull-timeLocationSan Francisco, CA

Contrario "Required Candidate Q&A" on the submission form:

1. Desired working location

(No additional screening questions provided on this role page.)

Stage 1 — 30-min background call — Initial background conversation. Stage 2 — 45-min technical round — Technical evaluation. Stage 3 — 45-min role-play project round — Project / scenario round. Stage 4 — 30-min culture round — Culture fit. Stage — Offer Stage — Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.

The pipeline also lists a "1+2+3 Combine round" stage. This appears to be a condensed/combined variant of the first three rounds rather than a separate sequential step — confirm with Contrario before relying on the exact sequence.

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