Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Full-Stack)

At Dscout, we’re building the most flexible and powerful UX research platform on the market—trusted by the world’s top brands in finance (JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, Charles Schwab, PayPal), healthcare (Aya, Headspace), consumer goods (Keen, Verizon, Target, Northface), and tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Meta, Spotify, AirBnB). Our tools help teams deeply understand the humans behind their products, so they can build better ones. We are expanding our smart and driven team and would love for you to join us.

1. Dscout AI Training & Evals

Dscout AI Training & Evals builds human data and evals that show whether AI works for real people. For ten years Dscout has captured how people behave in real context, with consent and scientific rigor. Dscout AI Training & Evals points that engine at AI: consented human behavior and judgment, turned into the training data, evals, and benchmarks AI teams trust.

Models ace benchmarks and still surprise people in the wild. A benchmark says how capable a model is. It does not say whether the model works for the person using it, across weeks, in the mess of real life. That gap is where we work.

We serve AI researchers, the product builders who ship alongside them, and the research teams who partner with both. We are a new unit inside an established company: live customers, a mature platform (React, Elixir, Python, Swift, Kotlin; SOC 2 and HITRUST certified), a small senior team, and room to build. We work AI-native. Agents write code, evals gate changes, and we aim to do in months what used to take years.

A note from our Chief AI Officer & GM. The hardest AI problems show up when a model meets real people, with their tools, their interruptions, and their goals. Our customers need a partner who can design the answer, build it, and ship it fast. Ground Truth sits where deployment meets research: what we learn in the field shapes the science, and the science shapes what we ship. Come build it with us.

Why this seat

• Work directly with AI labs and AI product teams on problems that have no playbook yet.
• Build on a platform that already works, so your time goes into the hard part, not the plumbing.
• Own technical decisions on your programs, and see your builds become product.
• Join a small senior team with direct access to the GM, our Principal Engineer, and the Head of AI Research.

2. Job Description

Our Strategic Project Leads run customer programs from first scoping call to final data delivery. You are their technical partner and builder. Customers ask for things that have not been built before: weeks of real-world AI use, captured in context, delivered as data a lab can train or evaluate on. You work out how. Some of it our platform already does, some needs configuring, and some has to be built. Knowing which is the job.

Programs you will work on

• Long-horizon, real-world use of AI products, captured over days and weeks.
• Side-by-side model comparisons judged by people who match a specific profile.
• Human judgment and preference data, delivered in formats a training pipeline can ingest.
• Feedback loops that connect real user behavior to model and product decisions.

What you will do

Scope and shape programs

• Turn a fuzzy customer brief into a technical plan in days, alongside the Project Lead.
• Decide what to reuse, extend, or build, and prove the gap before you write code.
• Write the scope down: what we will deliver, how it works, what could go wrong.

Build and ship

• Build capture flows, task logic, data pipelines, and delivery across web, mobile, and backend.
• Ship production code with real participants on the other end.
• Use coding agents and evals as part of how you build, and teach the habit to others.

Build trust into the data

• Own redaction, validation, provenance, and clean delivery.
• Design quality checks and human-review paths, and measure whether they work.
• Work with our research team so the data you ship carries evidence that it is good.

Turn the field into product

• Work with core engineering to move repeat builds into the platform. No forks.
• Tell us what customers keep asking for, and help decide what we build next.

Latitude. These areas are the core, not the whole list. You will have real room to propose new program types and platform capabilities as the market moves.

A good first year

• Several customer programs scoped and shipped, with you named by the customer.
• Signed scope to first data gets noticeably faster.
• Two or more custom builds absorbed into the core platform.
• Project Leads stop asking “can we do this?” and start asking “how fast?”

How we will hire: a conversation with the GM; a scoping exercise on a real, anonymized brief (what would you reuse, what would you build); a technical deep dive with core engineers; a conversation with the Project Leads and the Head of AI Research.

3. Requirements

What we care about most. Tools come and go. We care most about whether you can walk into a vague customer ask, find the shortest honest path to a working answer, and ship it. A particular stack or past FDE title matters less.

What you bring

• 7+ years shipping production full-stack software. We care more about what you have shipped than which languages you list.
• Experience working directly with technical customers, as a forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, or early founding engineer.
• Experience building and running data pipelines: ingest, clean, redact, deliver.
• Hands-on time with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or similar). You have shipped serious work with them, not just used autocomplete.
• Experience building with LLMs and a sense of how they get evaluated. You are at ease with non-determinism and reason about behavior across a distribution, not a fixed test suite.
• You write clearly and can explain a tradeoff to a researcher and to a PM.
• Based in the Bay Area, with occasional customer travel.

Nice to have: human data, labeling, or eval pipeline experience; mobile or browser-based capture; sensitive or regulated data; you have founded something.

Compensation: $250-400K OTE + Equity. Includes a built-in bonus and equity program, flexible PTO, 15 holidays, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 401k match, and an education stipend.

This is an ideal list. If the role excites you and you do not check every box, we would still love to hear from you.

Of course, what is outlined above is an ideal set of expectations; however, business needs and other projects and tasks may shift, and additional tasks could be assigned at the discretion of your manager.   About Dscout   Dscout is a team of passionate, empathetic, and curious professionals. As a recognized leader in the Forrester Wave, we’re at the cutting edge of experience research technology. The power of research drives us - how in-context insights from real people can build more enjoyable products and services.  We prioritize learning, sharing, and building. We also deeply value being a diverse and inclusive team and company and look for team members who align with that belief. Join our dynamic team and help shape product roadmaps and business strategies for the world’s most loved brands.   It doesn't stop there. When you join the Dscout team, you will get:

• A strong and competitive compensation package with a built-in bonus and equity program.
• An incredible and progressive benefits package (for both you and your dependents) to support work/life balance, including flexible PTO, 15 company holidays, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 401k match, and much more.
• An education stipend to support your growth & development, and a remote work stipend.
• A company that is open and transparent with our team. You will know what is happening and why it matters.

Dscout is an equal-opportunity employer that values diversity. We do not discriminate based on identity, including race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex, gender identity and expression, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.   If you need reasonable accommodations for any part of the employment process, please email us at accommodations@dscout.com with the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do everything possible to ensure you're well-prepared for success during our interview process, while also upholding your privacy, including accommodating any special requests. Please note that only inquiries regarding requests for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.   When you apply at Dscout, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references, as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. For more information about our privacy practices, please visit our Privacy Policy.    Dscout participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.

Location Flexibility: Dscout is proud to support a remote-first workforce and enable employees to work from almost anywhere. At this time, however, we are unable to hire in the following locations: Montana, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington DC.
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