Forward Deployed Engineer
Four founding roles in a new division, built from zero. You’d own one of Australia’s biggest operations end-to-end — discovery to deployed, frontier AI in your hands. It’s the closest a salaried role gets to founding a company: the autonomy, the ownership, the exposure — with twenty-five years of Kinetic trust behind you from day one.
The work.
You embed inside one of Australia’s biggest operations — an airline, a utility, a government department — and you find the work that quietly eats people’s days: the manual reconciliations, the status chased and cross-checked across half a dozen systems, the years of know-how nobody has written down.
Then you make it disappear. Frontier AI in your hands — agentic systems that reason, plan and act, custom agent harnesses, autonomous agents that hold an operation’s history and wake themselves on a heartbeat — shipped into their environment in days, not quarters. You sit next to the people who use it and watch the three-hour task become three minutes.
What’s worth building, you work out in the field — that’s the whole role. Nobody hands you a spec, because nobody has one. You work alongside the people who run the operation, surface the use cases that are both valuable and critical, and stand up proofs of concept — then let impact decide: double down on the ones that prove clear, immediate value. The winners move into production, with the rest of Kinetic behind you. Workflow by workflow, the operation runs differently than it has in years.
The mission is simple and large: close the gap between what frontier AI can already do and what the operations that run this country actually run on.
The stack.
“Frontier AI in your hands” is the literal job — so here’s the kit behind it. Every model worth using, all three clouds at their AI frontier, a full realtime-voice pipeline, and a laptop built to run models locally. Provisioned the week you start.
You build in TypeScript, React and Node by default — fast to ship, proven, boring in the best way. But you deploy into the customer’s world: their Python, their Java, their .NET, their data platform. The default gets you moving on day one; meeting them in the stack they already run is the job.
Every major provider, side by side. You reach for whatever wins the task — never what a single contract locked you into.
Not just their plumbing — their model platforms. Whichever a customer already runs, you build where they live.
Phone-call-capable agents, end to end. The whole pipeline is yours from week one.
The harness around the model — durability, memory, retrieval, and the tracing to trust it in production.
A live URL in an afternoon: branch-per-PR databases, managed auth, transactional email, CI that ships.
64GB of unified memory runs the full dev stack plus mid-size open models (7–32B) locally — private by default, zero marginal cost, offline when you need it.
It’s all here from day one — Claude Max on every engineer’s machine, every frontier API behind the things you build. And because the point of a sandbox is cycle time, there’s no procurement queue: when a project needs a tool, it’s pre-authorised and live the same day.
What the day-to-day demands.
We’ll tell you this in these terms in every conversation we have, because the right person leans in and the wrong person self-selects out — and that’s the cheapest filter either of us has.
TRAVEL, FOR REAL
Roughly a week at a time, multiple times a quarter per account, more during go-lives. On-site the Sunday night before a Monday launch. Pilot wrap-ups and reviews in person. The relationships, the speed, and ultimately the value all run through presence.
TRUST, EARNED BY SHIPPING
The customer’s last three big projects failed, and they assume we’re the same. Until you’ve shipped, you absorb the scepticism with grace. The deliverable after a bad meeting is a better product, not a complaint.
THE CLOCK IS ALWAYS RUNNING
Discovery to first working demo in days. Production software in the customer’s environment, with their data, their security review, their constraints. Everyone can see whether it’s moving.
BEING ON POINT
When something breaks at the account at 11 p.m. before the go-live, the person who fixes it is you. No backstop, no layer to escalate to overnight.
AT SCALE, REPEATEDLY
Doing things that don’t scale — at the next account, and the one after that. The platform compounding underneath you doesn’t shrink the mandate; it grows the leverage.
What we measure.
Two numbers, no theatre.
Outcome value per account.
Did the thing we promised actually change? Contract growth is the measurable proxy: contracts grow when outcomes compound, and not otherwise. A flat contract at a healthy account means we’ve stopped earning the right to harder problems.
Product leverage.
Is each subsequent deployment of the same outcome easier? Time-to-deploy at the next account, and the platform share of each deployment — rising, relentlessly. It’s the single best indicator that gravel is becoming pavement.
Requirements, plainly.
Five things we need to see. The traits behind them are unpacked in the FDE role conversation.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: you can architect, build, and ship production systems alone, across the stack, in unfamiliar environments.
- Hands-on depth with modern AI — LLMs, agents, retrieval, evals — and the judgement to tell the thing that demos well from the thing that actually works.
- Evidence of shipped outcomes under ambiguity. Not projects. Outcomes: something that worked, that mattered to someone, that you drove against resistance.
- You can hold a room with sceptical executives and earn trust with frontline operators — in the same day. Genuine, not salesy.
- Travel: roughly one week at a time, on-site with your account, multiple times a quarter. If this is a dealbreaker, this is the wrong role.
What we don’t require: a specific degree, a big-company logo, or deep domain expertise in any one industry. Domain knowledge can be trained.
Five situations. Two answers each.
No score. No percentage. The site doesn’t decide — you do. That’s the whole design. The traits these situations test are unpacked in the FDE role conversation — this is the applied version.
Monday is go-live. The version that works is ugly: hard-coded edges, no tests worth bragging about. The version you’d be proud of needs three more weeks.
How we'll evaluate you.
Most companies hide the rubric. Here’s ours — all eight signals, published. It can’t be gamed: the only way to have the stories is to have done the things.
Shipped outcomes under ambiguity
“Tell us about something you shipped where nobody told you what to build.”
LISTENING FOR · How you found the real problem versus the stated one. What you cut to hit the timeline. Who used it, what changed, what number moved.
Ownership depth
“Tell us about a time something was failing and it wasn’t your job to fix it.”
LISTENING FOR · The right person can’t tell this story without smiling. The wrong one explains whose job it actually was.
Customer empathy vs. salesiness
“What did the customer ask for — and what did you actually build?”
LISTENING FOR · Genuine empathy is specific: a user by name, by routine, by what made their job miserable. “Stakeholders” and “buy-in” are the wrong answer.
Constructive pushback
“Tell us about telling a customer — or your own product team — they were wrong.”
LISTENING FOR · Push back pointedly, then commit. All deference is a fail. All combat is a fail.
Pain translated into product
“What’s the worst a customer has ever treated you — and what did you change because of it?”
LISTENING FOR · The changelog after the story, not the survival. Contempt for past clients is disqualifying, however good the rest of the interview.
The splinter
We won’t ask for it directly — performed answers are easy.
LISTENING FOR · It shows up through biography: why you left, what failure still bothers you, what you built that nobody asked for. The real ones cost you something.
Speed under a real constraint
A live working session: messy context, unclear ask, hard deadline. Modern AI tooling encouraged.
LISTENING FOR · The order of operations. Interrogate the problem, find the valuable version, scope ruthlessly, build. We grade the choices and the working prototype — not the polish.
Cross-domain curiosity
“Tell us about a domain you went deep on that wasn’t yours. What did insiders miss?”
LISTENING FOR · The second and third question. The conference attended for fun. Red flag: every deep dive in your life was assigned.