Forward Deployed Engineer | Athena Intelligence

Athena Intelligence is engineering the future of work. We're at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence into enterprise operations, reshaping how humans and machines collaborate. Our flagship products include Olympus, an AI-native analytics platform, and Athena, an artificial employee designed to operate Olympus alongside enterprise teams.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Athena Intelligence, you'll be at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technology and real-world enterprise challenges. You'll work directly with our clients to solve their workflows with a mix of our existing products and new features you will build, following our core philosophy of engineering at the edge. You'll gain unique insights into important industries and institutions while contributing to our core products.

At Athena Intelligence, we believe in engineering at the edge, where Forward Deployed Engineers build the first version of any product in close collaboration with a single customer. This approach allows us to rapidly iterate and validate our solutions in real-world environments, providing crucial insights that shape our product development. As adoption grows, we integrate this into our core product and deploy it across our fleet, making the FDE role the cornerstone of our product strategy and the primary source of actionable intelligence for our product team.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, companies are increasingly adopting AI-first approaches before expanding headcount - similar to Shopify's recent strategic shift. This is precisely where Athena Intelligence comes in. As an FDE, you'll be at the forefront of this transformation, helping organizations integrate AI into their core operations and demonstrating how Athena can function as a valuable AI analyst employee alongside human teams.

Unlike traditional engineering roles where product innovation happens from a centralized research team, at Athena Intelligence, you'll be doing something we call "building at the edge." This means our product innovation happens from client sites, where you'll learn something valuable, put it into practice, and then work with product and platform engineering teams to roll it back into our core products.

Part of being a Forward Deployed Engineer at Athena Intelligence involves building an AI-assisted FDE capability. You'll support and accelerate your own work by teaching our AI systems to replicate aspects of your expertise and problem-solving approach. This creates a virtuous cycle where you build capabilities that make you and future FDEs more effective, continuously expanding what Athena can do for clients.

Our second forward-deployed engineer quickly mastered a new industry—law—and translated his insights into one of our core product lines, Flows, despite never having held a formal product or development role before. This exemplifies how you can make a tangible impact on our product evolution and see your ideas come to life quickly.

This cross-industry application is a perfect example of our horizontal approach: the legal workflows we developed have since been adapted for financial compliance teams and defense contractors, showing how core capabilities can be repurposed across regulatory-heavy environments with similar needs but different domain contexts.

Over the course of the last three years, Athena has been deployed across multiple industries, changing the way hundreds of people across different organizations do work. Our founding FDEs have been at the core of these transformations, directly shaping how AI is integrated into critical workflows and processes.

Unlike many AI companies that focus on a single industry, we build solutions that work across domains. As an FDE, you'll have the unique opportunity to work with many different industries and teach Athena to excel in diverse contexts, broadening both your expertise and our product's capabilities. We serve clients across legal, finance, defense, supply chains, retail, consulting, media & publishing sectors, with a particular focus on regulatory-heavy industries where AI adoption presents both significant challenges and opportunities.

We encourage the freedom to experiment with unconventional solutions to client challenges. For instance, to unlock a high-value customer workflow that required a complex browsing capability, we rolled out a human-in-the-loop labeling exercise as a fallback mechanism. This allowed us to deliver immediate value, gather crucial insights, and refine our product direction without delaying customer deadlines.

In the last year alone, our forward-deployed engineering team has traveled to Belgium, Paris, London, New York, DC, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, working with some of the world's most important institutions.

This position is based in our New York City office in SoHo. Athena Intelligence is a fully in-person and in-office team, working five days a week in the office. We believe in the power of face-to-face collaboration and maintaining a strong team culture through daily in-person interactions. The office location allows our team access to some of New York's best cuisine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

This role is for those who want to see the impact of their work on vital industries and institutions that shape our well-being. We partner with reputable institutions and companies on meaningful projects, steering clear of superficial or high-volume engagements.

By joining our team, you'll be at the forefront of the AI revolution in enterprise operations. You'll have the opportunity to work with advanced technologies, solve complex real-world problems, and make a significant impact on how some of the world's most important institutions operate. Our team's background from leading tech companies ensures you'll be working alongside and learning from some of the best in the field.

To apply for this position, please send your resume, a brief cover letter explaining why you're interested in joining Athena Intelligence, and a link to your GitHub repository to team@athenaintel.com. Please include "Forward Deployed Engineer Application" in the subject line.

We look forward to hearing from you and potentially welcoming you to the team that's shaping the future of work!