Forward Deployed Engineer

ABOUT US

Tavus https://www.tavus.io/ is building the human interface for AI. We're a Series B company backed by Sequoia, Accel, Lightspeed, Index Ventures, CRV, Scale Venture Partners, and Y Combinator. We're roughly 90–100 people, with offices in San Francisco and London. But what makes this role interesting isn't our funding or stage.

It's what a Customer Engineer actually gets to own and build here. The role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customers, and we think about it in three buckets:

1. PRODUCT SUPPORT & OWNERSHIP You'll work on some of the hardest technical challenges our customers face as they build and launch products with Tavus. When a customer is blocked, your job isn't simply to answer their question. You dig into what's actually preventing them from being successful, understand the root cause, and own getting them unblocked. Sometimes that means debugging a complex real-time system. Sometimes it means finding a bug and shipping the fix yourself. Sometimes you realize the customer is struggling because something is missing from Tavus, so you build the feature, improve the API, or rethink part of the product experience. You're close enough to customers to see problems before most of the company does, and technical enough to do something about them. The goal is not just to solve the problem in front of you. It's to make the product better because that problem happened.
2. FORWARD DEPLOYED PRODUCT & ENGINEERING You'll work directly with customers to take an idea from "we want to build this" to a real product running in production. That requires much more than writing code. You'll work with founders, product teams, and engineers to understand what they're trying to accomplish, help shape what the experience should actually be, push back when there's a better approach, and then build it. You might own the product experience, architecture, application code, Tavus integration, and deployment. You'll obsess over the small details that determine whether something simply works or actually feels great to use. These aren't demos that disappear after a sales call. Customers may commercialize what you build and put it in front of their own users. In some cases, a meaningful part of their business will depend on it. And you don't disappear after launch. You help make sure what you built remains reliable, scalable, and production-ready. You should be comfortable going from a blank page to a product that real people depend on.
3. INNOVATION & THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE This is probably the most unusual part of the role. Tavus is working with technology that is still defining its own category. There isn't a playbook for everything you can build with conversational video and AI because a lot of it hasn't been built yet. Part of your job is exploring the art of the possible. We want Customer Engineers who look at the technology and think: "What should exist now that this is possible?" And then go build it. Prototype something weird. Build an experience nobody asked for yet. Combine Tavus with other emerging technologies. Put it in front of people and see how they react. A big part of this job is simply building cool things that show people what the future could look like. THE TEAM You'd be joining a small Customer Engineering team that currently includes:

• An ex-founder and former Cruise software engineer
• A backend engineer from Spotify
• A two-time venture-backed founder We're looking to add two more people to this group. This is a small team with a lot of autonomy. You're expected to identify problems, make decisions, build things, and own the outcome. WHO TENDS TO BE GREAT AT THIS There isn't one perfect background. Ex-founders tend to be a strong fit because they're used to talking to users, sweating product details, writing code, making tradeoffs, and owning the outcome rather than just one piece of the stack. We'd also love to meet engineers from AI-native companies who have built and shipped customer-facing products, or people coming from forward-deployed / solutions engineering roles where they were writing real production code, not just integration glue. More than anything, we're looking for someone who combines: Product taste + strong engineering + customer obsession + attention to detail. That last part matters a lot. We care about the small parts of an experience: the extra second of latency, an awkward transition, an API that is technically correct but frustrating to use, or a workflow that takes five steps when it should take two. You should be full-stack enough to build a working product yourself and comfortable working with AI/LLMs, real-time systems, video, or APIs. You also need to genuinely enjoy working with customers. You'll run technical discovery, work directly with founders and engineering teams, challenge assumptions, push back on bad scope, and often be the technical and product face of Tavus. We're looking for someone who doesn't just think about what a customer is asking for today. You should be able to understand the underlying problem, obsess over the experience, and imagine what they'll want tomorrow.

COMPENSATION

& LOCATION Total compensation is roughly $180K–$230K. We have offices in San Francisco and London and are recruiting in both locations. For San Francisco, we prefer people who can be in the office around three days a week, but that isn't a hard requirement. Strong remote candidates count too. If you want to solve hard technical problems, build products customers will actually commercialize, own what you ship, and explore what's possible with frontier AI and video, we should talk.

Learn more: Tavus.io http://Tavus.io