Forward Deployed Engineer
Job description
Help us to increase the number of successful products in the world!
🌍 Location: We are full-remote and globally distributed! Our current team is distributed between GMT and GMT+2 so we currently only hire in these timezones.
🎤 Interview process: Read more about our interview process.
🖥️ Team: Product-led Sales
💼 Manager: Simon Fisher
💰 Compensation: Please check our compensation calculator.
🦔 Read more about how we hire and how we think about Diversity & Inclusion.
About PostHog
We're shipping every product that companies need to run their business from their first day, to the day they IPO, and beyond. The operating system for folks who build software.
We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including:
A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.
A customer data platform, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.
PostHog AI, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.
Next on the roadmap are CRM, workflow, revenue analytics, and support products. When we say every product that companies need to run their business, we really mean it!
We are:
Product-led. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.
Default alive. Revenue is growing 10% MoM on average, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.
Well-funded. We've raised more than $100m from some of the world's top investors. We're set up for a long, ambitious journey.
We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible.
Things we care about
Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.
Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what's going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.
Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we can't do that shipping at a normal pace. We've built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.
Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We're a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you've ever had.
Ambition: We want to solve big problems. We strongly believe that aiming for the best possible upside, and sometimes missing, is better than never trying. We're optimistic about what's possible and our ability to get there.
Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.
Why we are hiring for this role
We have our first FDE doing some great work but as we figure out the role we can see a large number of high spend customers are in need of some dedicated work to ensure they are set up successfully with PostHog, more than a TAM or CSM can deliver. We’re going to quickly run into a capacity problem and need to get ahead of it.
Who we need
A technical and customer-obsessed engineer to lead short-term projects with our biggest customers to ensure they are using PostHog according to recommended patterns. Customers should feel like you are an extension of their team, working alongside them to help them succeed with our product set.
You’ll also need an engineering mindset - whilst most of the role is hands-on implementation of PostHog, we also need you to build and maintain automated tooling which will help us take the learnings from these high-touch engagements and apply them en masse to all of our managed customers.
What you'll be doing
Auditing customer PostHog implementations for correctness, data quality, and privacy compliance.
Leading managed migrations from other solutions to PostHog, building tooling to automate as much of the process as possible.
Proactively mining support tickets, usage data, and customer conversations to surface at-risk accounts and recurring friction patterns.
Running deep technical investigations into customer-specific issues like identity resolution failures or feature flag evaluation inconsistencies.
Advising customers on experiment design, retention analysis, and behavioral monitoring strategy.
Integrating data into and out of PostHog using our in-product data pipelines.
Raising issues or opportunities outside your project scope to the PostHog team member responsible for the customer.
Shipping improvements to the PostHog product when customer patterns reveal friction worth fixing. Customer engineering is the job; product contributions follow from it.
Generally being their favorite ever person to work with in this space!
What you won’t be doing
Long-term customer ownership. This is all project-based work.
Customer engineering is the job. You'll ship improvements to the core product when they emerge directly from customer work, but you're not looking for a product engineering role with a customer-facing wrapper.
Requirements
Strong customer focus - you need to delight customers and ensure they are set up for success long-term with PostHog.
Prior experience in a similar consulting role for a product in our space.
Automation-minded. We want to make the move to PostHog as simple as possible so you’ll need to find and implement automation wherever possible so as to let us scale quickly.
Experience with SQL/Python
Willing to travel for onsite work with customers.
Nice to have
Understanding of best practices when it comes to implementing user-behavior based products (e.g. AARRR)
Experience deploying and using PostHog.
Experience optimizing SQL queries for performance.
You think about how your work, documentation, and tooling can be structured for consumption by both humans and AI.
Here are some recent examples of work done by our FDE team: