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Role description

Forward Deployed Engineer

Automat logoAutomatYC W23
AI-native
TypeFull-time
SponsorshipNo visa sponsorship
Salary$145,000–$185,000
LocationSan Francisco, CA
Engineering

What is Automat?

Automat was founded by a diverse group of creative technologists from teams like Google Creative Lab, and Samsung’s innovation Think Tank Team. We envision a future where intelligent agents streamline business operations - and one day, run their own enterprises. We're redefining Enterprise AI Agents (Robotic Process Automation) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), developing the necessary tooling and infrastructure to incorporate the advancements of AI into practical, real-world applications.

We value curiosity, collaboration, and impact above rigid requirements. If you're excited about AI and automation, thrive in flexible, creative environments, and want to work on meaningful, pioneering projects, this role is for you.

We encourage anyone to apply - we think talent, passion and your unique perspective can outweigh years of experience. We are really looking for someone who can hit the ground running on day one and contribute at a rapid pace, while also being someone from whom we ourselves can learn from.

The Role

We're looking for a Forward-deployed Engineer to interface directly with our customers in an effort to solve their pain points and drive real-world operating efficiency and cost savings. You will apply creativity and problem-solving to help customers implement complex business automations via our suite of internal libraries, tools, and products. You'll act as a trusted expert and be a human-in-the-loop partner to our agentic automation engine.

This role is inherently cross-functional - you’ll often be the bridge between product, engineering, and customer teams. It is as important to be comfortable with sales conversations and identifying upsell opportunities as it is to understand how we can expand Automat’s suite of AI-powered product offerings to improve velocity and scale.

What you’ll do

  • Build upon our autonomous agent solutions to tailor RPA and IDP solutions to specific, customer centric workflows.

  • Leverage state-of-the-art UI automation techniques to help our AI agents navigate complex and, often legacy, enterprise software platforms to achieve our customers' automation goals

  • Think creatively about how to align automation strategies with the needs of our customers, while driving long term innovation and resilience to the entire Automat product offering.

  • Wear multiple hats; one day, you will prototype a new stealth browsing technique, and the next, optimize a pipeline for intelligent document understanding

What drives you

  • Methodically working through complex technical challenges, no matter how detailed or demanding, until the solution emerges.

  • Supporting customer pain points and expanding out of the box product capabilities

  • Collaborating in teams of both technical and non-technical members

  • Finding creative, deterministic solutions to complex and unstable technical puzzles

What’s in your toolbox

  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills

  • Demonstrated success in a Customer-facing technical role (e.g., sales engineering, solutions engineering, forward deploy engineering, etc.)

  • Robust web automation background, particularly leveraging tools like Selenium and Playwright

  • Experience using AI tools effectively (e.g. Cursor, Windsurf, lovable, etc.)

What we are looking for

  • Top notch communication and collaboration skills, particularly bridging discussions between technical and non-technical teams

  • Comfort navigating ambiguity and wearing multiple hats

  • Proactive mindset and high initiative, with a bias toward action

  • An intrinsic desire to leave things better than you found them

  • Work across the stack and be multi-disciplinary

  • Experience as an IC in startups or other dynamic, high-growth setting

Relevant archetypes

Apply on Y Combinator
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Company info

Automat logo

Automat

Automat is an AI automation company building reliable, self-healing, and scalable agents for business workflows.

Legacy RPA is brittle, expensive, and slow to deploy. Automat's click-based AI agents work on top of your existing tools, handle exceptions on their own, and self-heal when things change. We manage every automation end to end, so customers get reliable, scalable operations and full visibility without the overhead.

Private companySeries AYC W23
Founded2023
HQSan Francisco, United States
Size26 employees
Unlock human wisdom
ThesisTermsPrivacy
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Funding
  • Series A · Nov 19, 2025
  • Seed · $3.8M · Sep 6, 2023
Investors
Initialized CapitalFelicisKhosla VenturesY CombinatorGoodwater Capital

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