Role Description
What you'll do
- Make live energy data understandable
- Build interfaces for status, alarms, events, and telemetry
- Learn how infrastructure software behaves when the physical world is involved
- Own sub-modules inside the codebase and use your immense talent to string together a living execution engine that becomes the heartbeat of Powertown
- Absorb company intel from the team, trust your intuition, predict blockers in the future, and build software that resonates with you
Preferred majors
Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Energy Systems, Robotics, Mathematics, Physics, or a similar technical field.
Ideal candidate
- You are a technical student who likes real systems more than toy apps
- You are careful, curious, and hard to overwhelm. You like the idea that a bug might not just break a button, but misrepresent what is happening in a live asset
- This is a high-agency, high-ownership role. Open to the most artistic thinkers with a knack for identifying when things may break
Preferred qualifications
- Evidence of initiative through projects, research, internships, competitions, open-source work, robotics, hardware/software projects, simulations, or self-directed technical building
- Experience working with agents for live data, sensors, energy systems, IoT, visualization, or operational software
- Exceptional ability exemplified through personal projects
Compensation Range: $190K - $200K
About Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.
Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.
Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.
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