Forward Deployed Engineer
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NewForm is building the creative intelligence layer for paid advertising. We pair an in-house creative pod with Framework, our proprietary statistical testing engine that instruments every ad it ships, to build a creative ontology for each brand: a living map of what works, why it works, and how to make more of it. The service we sell is the creative your paid spend needs. The asset we build is yours to keep.
We work with brands like Kalshi, Babbel, Acorns, and Western Union. We oversee north of $100M in annual ad spend, ship 3,000+ ads a month, and Framework has run 6,000+ structured creative tests to date. We're at $7M ARR, doubling YoY for two years running.
The role ------------
This is a Palantir-style Forward-Deployed Engineer role adapted for the creative supply chain. You won't be writing tickets handed to you by a PM. You'll be in the room when a strategist hits a workflow ceiling, deciding in real time whether the answer is a new Framework feature, a one-off automation, or a data pipeline that didn't exist yesterday. Then you build it.
You'll embed with our services pods: strategists, creators, media buyers, Creative Intelligence Leads and build the software they need to run faster, learn more, and ship more winning ads. You own a roadmap, not a ticket queue. The roadmap is generated by what you observe sitting next to operators in real client work.
The work compounds in two directions. The bespoke things you ship for one client become the next generalized Framework feature. The patterns you spot across the services team become the roadmap.
What you'll do ------------------
- Embed with one or two pods at a time. Sit in their reviews, briefs, and post-mortems. Understand the work end to end before you write code.
- Build into Framework when the problem is structural. Build bespoke when the problem is one client's. Make the call on which is which.
- Own the end-to-end technical lifecycle for client deployments: onboarding, ad account integrations (Meta, TikTok, Google), data reconciliation, custom dashboards, and the tooling that closes the gap between platform APIs and how strategists actually want to work.
- Translate field signal into product. Every workaround a strategist invents is a feature waiting to be written. Surface those patterns to the core engineering team and to leadership directly.
- Run your own roadmap. We'll set direction; you set sequence. You should be able to defend why the thing you shipped this week mattered more than the thing you didn't.
What success looks like ------------------------------
- 30 days: You've embedded with at least one pod, mapped where their workflow is breaking, and shipped your first piece of useful tooling to production. Small is fine. Real is what matters.
- 60 days: You've shipped meaningful client tooling end to end, identified two or three patterns that should become Framework features, and the pod you're embedded with treats you as part of the team.
- 6 months: You've shipped at least one of those patterns into core Framework, built repeatable deployment runbooks for new client onboardings, and the services team is asking for you by name. The playbook for the next FDE hire is yours.
Who you are ---------------
- 3+ years building software, with real time in client-facing, deployment, or solutions engineering work. You've shipped things that lived inside someone else's company.
- Fluent in TypeScript and Next.js, comfortable in modern React, and have built non-trivial backends.
- You've worked with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) at the application layer.
- You can hold a real conversation with a non-technical operator without losing precision. You can sit in a media review and understand what's actually broken. You can also write the PR that fixes it.
- You're scrappy in the way that ships, not the way that accumulates tech debt. The thing you build for a client today should still be running cleanly six months from now.
- You're comfortable with ambiguity. Client environments differ. Specs are incomplete. You move forward anyway.
- You have an entrepreneurial streak. Side projects, prior founding experience, leadership somewhere. You've done things outside a job description.
What this role isn't ------------------------
- Not a solutions engineer taking tickets from sales. The pod is your customer. The brand is theirs. You build for the people building for the brand.
- Not a generic full-stack role. The differentiator is being close enough to the problem to know what to build before anyone files a ticket. If you want clean specs, this is the wrong job.
- Not a consulting gig. You're not writing SOWs or billing hours. You're building software that the services team uses every day and that compounds into the platform.
Our commitment to you ----------------------------
The tradeoff. We choose proximity over abstraction. You'll ship code from a strategist's desk before the spec exists, because we'd rather solve the actual problem than wait for the right ticket to be filed. If that sounds chaotic, this isn't the right fit. If that sounds like Tuesday, we should talk.
Why this matters. NewForm is at an inflection point. We have the services motion working alongside Framework in production. What we don't yet have is a scaled forward-deployed engineering function that turns every client engagement into platform leverage. You'd be the person who builds it. When NewForm is 5x the size it is today, you'll be the one who defined how the FDE function works.
Compensation ----------------
- Base: $120,000 – $225,000, depending on level
- Equity: 0.25% – 1.0%, four-year vest with a one-year cliff
- Total comp at midpoint: roughly $250,000/year (cash plus annualized equity), with meaningful upside as the company scales
Logistics -------------
- Location: NYC, in-office, 4 days a week
- Travel: Light. Mostly NYC-local, with occasional visits to client offices (<10%)
- Benefits: Health, dental, and vision fully covered. $300/mo commuter benefit. Annual team offsites (recent ones: Tulum and Hokkaido)
- Work authorization: Must be authorized to work in the US. We can't sponsor visas now or in the future.
About New Form Digital
New Form is developing original series and investing in digital content.