Forward Deployed Research Engineer (FDRE - Clearance)
Full-time and New York, US
ABOUT POOLSIDE
In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will define the winners. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research, engineering, infrastructure and deployment at scale. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this. They will create powerful economic engines. They will obsess over the success of their users and customers.
poolside exists to be this company - to build a world where AI will be the engine behind economically valuable work and scientific progress.
ABOUT OUR TEAM
You’ll join a tight-knit group of engineers and researchers from leading labs and product companies (DeepMind, Palantir, GitHub, among others). The culture is low-ego and high-bar, organized around hard problems. It’s a place to learn by building - side-by-side with people who care about craft, rigor, and impact - on challenges that matter and aren’t found anywhere else. Very few companies get a seat at this table, and all the ingredients are in place to give us the right to win. Now we just need to execute.
ABOUT THE ROLE
As an FDRE, you'll be embedded with customers, figuring out how to build real agentic systems to solve hard problems.
Hard problems aren’t solved from an armchair; the right to solve them comes from experience, resilience, and a little scar tissue, earned by engaging with reality.
This role gives you direct exposure to frontier AI R&D and a front-row seat to the most valuable problems and industries on the planet. You’ll operate at the intersection of software engineering, applied AI and agent research, and product - designing and deploying high-reliability systems, while feeding signal back into our products and models. This role requires US clearance.
RESPONSIBILITIES
FDREs work in small teams with the agility and autonomy of a startup, but with the experience and support of an established organization. Among other things, you will
Own the mission end-to-end. Be the technical owner in the field, clarify goals, shape the plan, make the hard calls, and ship systems that move real metrics.
Partner for impact. Work directly with operators and executives to scope what matters most, then turn it into production results.
Build with research in the loop. Collaborate with AI R&D on prompts, tools, and model improvements; bring back field-signals that make the next model, and the platform, better.
Turn wins into a flywheel. Convert patterns into playbooks, products, and libraries so that every deployment is faster, more powerful, and more reliable than the last.
WHAT YOU'LL SEE IN THE FIELD
These are the kinds of skills and technologies you’ll likely use and develop over time. Strong experience in any is a plus, not a prerequisite. We look for spikes!
Software engineering & platforms: Backend services at scale; distributed systems; data/feature pipelines; queues/caching; fault tolerance.
Agentic/LLM systems: multi-agent systems; agent communication/delegation; evals; long-running, fault-tolerant agents; tools/prompt/program design; guardrails.
Evaluation & experimentation: Designing evals; monitoring performance/drift; fundamentals of Data Science/ML; able to turn a hazy problem into a structured exploration.
Cloud & ops: Kubernetes, Docker, IaC (Terraform/CDK), networking, secrets, observability (Grafana/Prometheus/Datadog), CI/CD.
Model ops: Fine-tuning/RL; designing agent environments; managing inference.
Enterprise delivery: Security/compliance, data governance, integration with legacy systems.
SKILLS & EXPERIENCE
Exceptional, high-agency, low-ego. You bias to action, collaborate well, and are motivated by impact and outcome.
Learning-driven. You pick up new domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and turn are comfortable with ambiguity.
Product-minded. You translate field pain into clean abstractions, docs, and tools others can use.
Adventurer. You are eager and willing to travel and experience new things, and meet unforeseen challenges with creativity and resourcefulness.
If you’re unsure whether you check every box, you should still apply! Impact beats pedigree here.
PROCESS
Intro call with a member of the Forward Deployed team
Technical Interview with a Member of Engineering
Interview with (another) member of the Forward Deployed team
People Interview with Beatriz, Head of People
BENEFITS
Fully remote work & flexible hours;
37 days/year of vacation & holidays;
Health insurance allowance for you and dependents;
Company-provided equipment;
Wellbeing, always-be-learning and home office allowances;
Frequent team get togethers in Paris;
Great diverse & inclusive people-first culture.
Data Retention
Except as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law or regulation, we will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, as required to satisfy any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements, or as necessary to resolve disputes. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider our statutory obligations, the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes we process your personal data for, and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means. We specify the retention periods for your personal data in our data retention policy. Under some circumstances we may anonymize your personal data so that it can no longer be associated with you. We reserve the right to use such anonymous and de-identified data for any legitimate business purpose without further notice to you or your consent. If you are offered and accept employment with poolside, the personal data we collected during the application and recruitment process will become part of your employment record, and we may use it in connection with your employment consistent with our employee personal data policies. If you do not become an employee, or, once you are no longer an employee of poolside, we will retain and securely destroy your personal data in accordance with our document retention policy and applicable laws and regulations.
Rights of Access, Correction, Erasure and Objection
It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during the recruitment process. By law you may have the right to request access to, correct, and erase the personal data that we hold about you, or object to the processing of your personal data under certain circumstances. You may also have the right to request that we transfer your personal data to another party. If you want to review, verify, correct, or request erasure of your personal data, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal data to another party, please contact us at legal@poolside.ai . Any such communication must be in writing. We may request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and your right to access, and to provide you with the personal data that we hold about you or make your requested changes. Applicable law may allow or require us to refuse to provide you with access to some or all of the personal data that we hold about you, or we may have destroyed, erased, or anonymized your personal data in accordance with our record retention obligations and practices. If we cannot provide you with access to your personal data, we will inform you of the reasons why, subject to any legal or regulatory restrictions.
Right to Withdraw Consent
Where you have provided your consent to the collection, processing, and transfer of your personal data, you may have the legal right to withdraw your consent under certain circumstances. To withdraw your consent, if applicable, contact us at legal@poolside.ai
Changes to this Privacy Notice
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new Privacy Notice when we make any updates. If we would like to use your previously collected personal data for different purposes than those we notified you about at the time of collection, we will provide you with notice and, where required by law, seek your consent, before using your personal data for a new or unrelated purpose. We may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent only where required by applicable law or regulation.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about our processing of your personal data or would like to make an access or other request, please contact us at legal@poolside.ai