Forward Deployed Engineer

At Vendasta, we're leading the AI revolution from right here in Saskatoon—and beyond. We work together to empower our partners and customers through our AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform to help them get more customers—and keep them. We're proud to share that Vendasta has officially been named one of Canada's Most Admired Corporate Cultures for 2025!

Your Impact

The Forward Deployed Engineer is a front-line software engineer embedded directly in high-stakes customer implementations. Operating at the intersection of platform capabilities and real-world client constraints, you will act as a strategic bridge between Sales and Research & Development. You will bridge-build integration gaps by rapidly constructing custom "Gravel Roads" to unlock customer value immediately, then document and abstract those solutions so central R&D can pave them into standard "Paved Highways." 

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work with Sales, Research & Development, central Product Engineering, and client executives to:

• Design & build enterprise data integrations, RAG pipelines, and multi-system API workflows.
• Construct automated Evaluation test suites to benchmark system performance and retrieval accuracy against real customer data.
• Rapidly build production-grade custom code, glue scripts, and workaround solutions for unmet platform needs in client environments, ensuring all work is tracked in Jira for accountability.
• Partner directly with central Product Engineering to abstract field hacks and bespoke integrations into standard platform features, avoiding the creation of a "shadow backlog".
• Diagnose and fix high-tier production bugs, API failures, model execution errors, and pipeline drops in live deployments.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a closely related quantitative field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2–3 years in a senior, client-facing technical role (e.g., Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Lead).
• Full-stack and AI/data fluency with proficiency in Python, TypeScript, REST APIs, Vector Databases, and RAG architecture.
• Exceptional communication bandwidth to translate technical bottlenecks to client executives.
• Proven ability to exercise discretion, diplomacy, and bring technical clarity. 
  
• You thrive in chaotic, high-visibility, client-facing environments and prefer building quick production fixes in messy legacy code over insulated spec sheets.
• You grasp non-deterministic software architecture, understand that LLMs are probabilistic, and instinctively know how to debug AI agent failures at API steps or context retrieval without finger-pointing.

About Us 

We help businesses get more customers. And keep them. We're on a mission to build the most trusted AI-powered platform for small businesses and the partners who support them. At Vendasta, you'll be part of something ambitious: helping bring AI transformation to local businesses at scale. As a team member, you'll enjoy:

Competitive health benefits, flex time, and annual work-from-anywhere options Equity opportunities and a chance to directly shape our AI future A vibrant workplace culture that embraces experimentation, thought leadership, and continuous learning A place where building AI isn't just a buzzword, it's the core of everything we do.

Join the Vendasta team, where your professional mastery and intellectual growth drive our platform forward. Step into an AI-first organization built for elite problem solvers who thrive on tackling complex business challenges and scaling sophisticated, automation-driven solutions. Accelerate your professional trajectory through rigorous learning tracks, continuous operational development, and exposure to cutting-edge AI methodologies designed to push the boundaries of the B2B SaaS industry. We are bound by a high-performance culture rooted in our core values—Drive, Innovation, Respect, and Agility—where the true reward is the complexity of the challenge and the scale of your global impact. At Vendasta, you will find the infrastructure to build, the ecosystem to innovate, and an elite peer group required to sharpen your expertise.

Master your craft. Solve the impossible. Build the future of SaaS with us.