Lead the engineering on critical customer projects. You'll own scope, sequencing, and delivery against the timelines that high-stakes deals demand, embedded in the implementation cadence alongside our Field PM and Solutions Consultants.
Ship high-impact features that move the most important strategic deals and renewals forward. The work this team takes on is what makes the platform enterprise-grade
net-new product capabilities, framework gaps (APIs, exports, notifications, etc), and targeted enhancements that ship in days or weeks.
Bring strong product sense to every decision. Partner with core product teams to decide what to build, what to push back on, and what to redirect. Strong opinions are welcome; strong opinions grounded in what you heard on a customer call are gold.
Shape Zip's long-term platform and roadmap. Features you ship land at our most critical customers first and compound into the platform, and the patterns you see first become next year's product investments.
Communicate directly with customers. You'll be on calls with procurement, finance, and IT teams, diagnose problems live against real deadlines, and translate trade-offs in language that lands with both engineers and executives.

Strong software engineering skills. You've shipped non-trivial production systems and you can read and write code across the stack: Python on the backend and React/TypeScript on the frontend at Zip.
Product instincts and judgment. You're the engineer on your current team who pushes back on poorly scoped requirements, who notices when a feature is solving the wrong problem, and who's willing to say so.
Customer empathy and crisp communication. You can sit in a room with a Director of Procurement at a $50B company, hear what they're actually worried about, and translate it into a tech spec, and vice versa. If you've never done this before but the idea sounds energizing, that counts.
Speed and urgency with a high quality bar. You can move on a customer-driven timeline and still write code that holds up in production.
High ownership. You diagnose, build, and ship with minimal supervision. You're the kind of engineer who follows a problem upstream until it's actually fixed.
Helpful, not required:
Prior experience as a product engineer or full-stack engineer on a team that owned features end-to-end, shipped frequently, and worked closely with users or customers.
Prior founder or early-employee experience. Many of the best FDEs are people who want to start a company someday and are using this role to build empathy for what enterprises actually buy and why.
Experience with procurement, finance, ERP, or AP automation systems.

Software Engineer, Forward Deployed

Key skills