Forward-Deployed Engineer

ABOUT AIUC

AIUC builds standards and insurance for frontier AI. Our mission is to Underwrite superintelligence https://underwriting-superintelligence.com/. We exist because risk, not capability, is becoming the binding constraint on AI being useful. History offers lessons for how to build confidence in new technology; electricity burned down houses until insurers funded Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to certify products against their standards. Today, the UL mark is a trustmark on every light bulb in America. We’re building that for AI.

AIUC-1, our standard for agent security, serves frontier builders like Cursor, Lovable, ElevenLabs, and Harvey. We've raised $55m from Ribbit, First Harmonic and Nat Friedman to audit frontier AI. Our team comes from METR, Anthropic, McKinsey, and OpenAI. Come join us.

THE ROLE

Every AI company that comes to us wants the same thing: proof their agent is safe enough to sell to an enterprise. Getting there means running thousands of evaluations against their live system.

We've now certified the category leaders in every major AI vertical: ElevenLabs (voice), Intercom (customer service), UiPath (workflow automation), Lovable (coding), and more we'll announce soon. No two of those systems look alike: each has its own authentication, its own interface, its own definition of what a failure even looks like. Before we can test any of it, someone has to sit with that customer, understand how their agent actually works, and get it wired into our evaluation system.

We're hiring an engineer to own that work end to end. You'll have your own set of customers within your first weeks, paired with a commercial counterpart on each one.

In this role, you will:

- Own the path from signed customer to delivered results - scoping what to test, working through their authentication and interfaces, and getting their agent running in our system

- Build the one-off version when a customer doesn't fit the product yet, and make it work anyway

- Deliver results directly to the customer and be the person they trust with the technical detail

- Make the call on whether a customer meets the AIUC-1 standard

- Work across the widest surface of any role here: our Delivery team, our core engineers, sales, the Standards team (shaping what goes into AIUC-1), and your customer's own engineering team

- Turn what you learn in the field into the product

That last one is why the role exists. We're building toward a product that runs evaluations end to end without an engineer in the loop. This is a high-agency role: you'll shape what we build next as much as you'll deliver what we've built.

If you're planning to start a company one day, this is a front row seat. You'll work directly with our founders, with founders at the companies we certify, and alongside a team full of ex-founders.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

The job in practice looks like reading someone's API docs, chasing credentials, building integrations into customers' systems and agents. Then evaluating whether those agents behave, and owning the failure modes the evals surface. The person who thrives here has done this work before. What drives them is trust and safety.

To be successful, we think you have:

- 3-7 years of experience, likely as an early engineer at a startup where you ended up owning customers, or in an integration, solutions, or forward deployed role selling technical products to technical buyers. (Impact matters more than years.)

- Enough software engineering to build and debug an integration yourself, and the judgment to know when the scrappy version is the right answer

- Comfort owning a customer relationship directly – scoping the work, setting expectations, and delivering bad news early

- Customer obsession: their problem is your problem, and you see it through

- The discipline to turn what you see in the field into something reusable rather than solving the same problem twice

NICE TO HAVE

- Experience founding or co-founding a company

- Experience with AI evaluations or red-teaming

- Executive presence with senior stakeholders

OUR VALUES

We are in the business of building trust. We take our values seriously and treat them as commitments to each other, held to the same bar as the ones we make to customers.

• Strong back: high standards, keep our promises, work hard.

• Fast feet: experiment, cut scope, take delight in pace.

• Eyes up: wrestle with the mission, and let where AI is heading shape our strategy, our teams and our day-to-day work.

• Open heart: say the scary thing, create connection, make room for emotions.

Underwriting superintelligence is our life's work. If you want it to be yours, apply now.

COMPENSATION & PERKS

- Competitive annual salary

- Equity (significant part of total compensation)

- Health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

- Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if needed

- Daily lunch, dinner & snacks