Shovels is the intelligence layer for the built world. Everything built starts with a permit, and we collect, clean, and turn the messy public permit, contractor, property, and zoning data that governments keep but never make usable into the signals our customers make decisions on. We're venture-backed, trusted by some of the largest Fortune 100 companies in the world.
We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer: a real engineer who wants to work shoulder-to-shoulder with customers and turn their hardest questions into working solutions. You'll embed into our most important enterprise accounts, understand what they're actually trying to do, and build the maps, models, and data products that make Shovels indispensable to them, working alongside AI agents the way the rest of our engineering team does. This is not a hand-off role: you own the relationship and the build, from the first "what if we could see…" to the moment the customer says "wow."
What you'll do
- Deploy into strategic accounts: embed as the technical partner into our most important enterprise customers. Learn their business, their data, and their use cases deeply, and translate them into concrete solutions. Work side by side with your Shovels Customer Success and Data Insights team to join calls, participate in working sessions, and build the partnership with our top customers.
- Build customer-facing data products: ship maps, dashboards, embeds, and reports on Shovels data (ArcGIS / Esri, maps.shovels.ai, the REST API, and BigQuery/Snowflake data shares) with intelligence signals embedded so the output drives customer decisions.
- Turn ambiguity into shipped work: take a vague customer ask to a fast, trustworthy prototype and iterate live, then productionize and templatize so each build makes the next one faster.
- Close the loop to product & eng: you're the closest technical resource we have to the customer; feed what you learn in the field back into the roadmap, the data model, and the signals we build.
- Stand behind the numbers: validate the data and sanity-check every signal. If it ships under Shovels' name, it has to be something we trust.
- Work high-leverage with agents: like the rest of engineering, you build alongside AI agents, creating skills, workflows, and tooling that let one person deliver what used to take a team.
Who you are
- A real engineer who wants face-to-face time with customers. You self-select into customer work, not away from it, and you're energized by a customer's "aha" moment.
- Living AI engineering, not observing it. You have earned opinions on harnesses, context, and verification from shipped work, and you build with agents by default.
- Strong fundamentals in Python, SQL, and working with large, messy real-world data, able to sketch a solution without AI assistance as your foundation.
- A builder of things people can see. You've shipped data visualizations, maps, or geospatial/GIS products (ArcGIS / Esri experience is a strong plus) that non-technical people immediately understood.
- Staff-level judgment on speed vs. trust. You know when a one-day prototype is the right call and when the answer has to be bulletproof.
- Entrepreneurial. You identify gaps, build solutions, and ship without waiting for a spec, and you can earn a sophisticated customer's trust in the room.
- Domain-curious. Knowledge of construction, real estate, permitting, or MEP is a plus, but an appetite to go learn it directly from customers matters more.
How we work
- U.S.-based, by design for this role: unlike our core engineering roles (which span the Americas and Europe), the Forward Deployed Engineer is U.S.-based and authorized to work in the U.S. You need real-time overlap with U.S. customers and to join their calls live.
- Radical transparency on financials, strategy, and company direction.
- Weekly AI Lab for trading agent workflows and prompt patterns.
- Build for the customer.
- Fully remote, async-friendly, with competitive salary, meaningful equity, and at least twice-yearly in-person gatherings.
How to apply
Send your resume, LinkedIn profile, and a short note on why you're excited about Shovels and this role to ryan@shovels.ai. It's a short process, and you hear back either way.
