Forward-Deployed Engineer
Turn messy customer processes into workflows agents can run.
Location:NYC - On-site, frequent travel to customer sites
Employment type:Full-time
Compensation:$200K - $300K base | Equity | Performance bonus
About Specter
Specter is building an autonomous accounting system that can be deployed at every company. Our agents run payables, receivables, reconciliations, and the close for finance teams that have spent decades duct-taping spreadsheets to legacy ERPs.
The hard part of this problem isn't language models - it's context. Every company books revenue differently, codes expenses differently, and defines "done" differently. The accountant who's been doing the work for ten years has all of this in their head. Specter builds the systems that capture it, structure it, and let agents act on it correctly. Our platform learns each customer's data, processes, and rules over time, so the work our agents do is the work a senior accountant would actually sign off on.
We're a small, dense team in NYC. VC-backed, real customers, real revenue, zero churn so far. Accounting is fundamental to every company in the world, and we intend to build the system that handles it end to end.
The role
Every Specter customer has a different chart of accounts, a different ERP, a different definition of "the close," and a different person who's been doing reconciliations the same way since 2009. The forward-deployed engineer is the person who sits with that customer, understands their actual process at the level of detail that nobody outside the company has bothered to learn, and turns it into something our agents can run.
This is one of the highest-leverage roles at the company. You make customers successful in the short term, and what you learn becomes product in the long term. If you're the kind of engineer who gets bored without a real-world problem in front of you, this is the role.
What you'll do
- Embed with customers. Get into their ERP, their spreadsheets, their Slack, their AP inbox. Learn how the work actually happens - not how the org chart says it happens.
- Build customer-specific configurations, integrations, agent workflows, and one-off tooling. Ship them within days, not quarters.
- Translate what you learn into the core product. The patterns you see across customers are the next features, and the friction you see is the next thing to fix at the platform level.
- Own onboarding and time-to-value. New customers should be running their first real reconciliation through Specter inside the first week.
- Be the company's eyes and ears in the field. Bring back the things customers won't say in a sales call but will say to an engineer at their kitchen table.
What we look for
- Engineer first, customer-facing second. You can read a 200-row reconciliation spreadsheet and find the structural pattern in it before the customer finishes explaining it to you.
- Comfort with finance and accounting concepts, or strong appetite to learn them fast. We'll teach you what a suspense account is; you teach us how to automate it.
- Willingness to fly to a manufacturing plant in Ohio if that's what it takes. The best work in this role doesn't happen on Zoom.
- Bias for shipping over slideware. The deliverable is a working integration, not a deck.
Nice to have
- Prior experience at a forward-deployed team (Palantir, Ramp Implementations, Stripe Solutions, similar).
- Background in accounting, controllership, audit, or finance operations.
- Comfort writing SQL against an unfamiliar schema with no documentation.
Interested in joining? Apply now
Complete the short application and attach your resume. Links to work you are proud of are more useful than a polished cover letter.