Forward Deployed Engineers at Heron Data (S20) $150K - $250K • 0.05% - 0.15% We automate document-heavy workflows in financial services and beyond New York, NY, US Full-time US citizen/visa only 1+ years About Heron Data We are Heron Data, a Series A stage company based in New York and London. At Heron, we use the latest advances in AI and LLMs to automate document processing. Our software handles emails, analyzes attachments, and takes actions like updating CRMs or requesting more info to execute workflows end-to-end for our customers. We serve a range of businesses including some of the world's largest fintechs, banks and other specialty finance companies, commercial insurers, and more. Our largest product automates underwriting for small business lenders and other specialty finance companies. We eliminate cumbersome manual processes and enable our customers to provide their services with much greater speed, precision, and fairness. We are a rapidly growing company with over 150 customers in financial services and beyond who trust us to be embedded in critical processes - without us, their businesses stop. We analyze tens of thousands of documents a day, including over 20 million individual bank transactions daily for our customers. We continue to grow into more segments and workflows: further into lending, banking, insurance. And we think there's much more we can do! We are a lean, scrappy and committed team with a flat structure and collaborative culture. Our team brings together a wealth of experience from great tech companies including Facebook, Spotify, Revolut and many other startups from around the world. With team members from five different continents, we embrace multiculturalism and diversity. From company events to everyday interactions, we make sure everyone feels welcome and accommodate all cultural and dietary requirements. Since our launch in September 2020, at the end of the S20 batch, we've experienced a lot of growth! Today, we serve over 150 customers and have over $7M in ARR. Read more about our mission here About the role Skills: Git, JavaScript, Python, Google Cloud We are seeking high-performing NYC-based engineers of any level to help us solve more of our customers’ problems. We are looking for folks who are excited about designing elegant technical solutions and shipping great code frequently. If you are looking for a fresh challenge at a fast-growing AI startup - we would love to hear from you! What You’ll Do This is a hands-on (‘individual contributor’) role focused on solving and building the ‘last mile’ of software that enables our platform to really solve our customers’ problems. This will include working on the following in close, direct collaboration with our customers and members of our sales and operations teams. Designing, building and maintaining backend services and APIs Designing and building new UI/web components Developing new integrations to third party services and AI models Help triage bugs, investigate production incidents, and contribute to postmortems and root cause analysis Participating in code reviews, collaborating across technical and non-technical teams and stakeholders What We’re Looking For Our ideal hire will: Enjoy -actually- building and making an impact: you get a kick out of shipping code frequently, iteratively, and collaboratively. You value MVPs and customer impact over perfectly engineered systems. You can take responsibility over the end-to-end deployment of what you build. Want to understand customer problems first hand: you’re not content sitting in an office and theorizing about a problem. You enjoy seeing and breaking down customer problems in-person, which may include traveling to see customers all across the US (and sometimes internationally!) Thrive at solving tough technical problems: you enjoy breaking down challenges into simple and well-designed solutions. You are fact-oriented and thoughtful in your approach, but you don’t get bogged down in over-intellectualizing or over-complicating things. Scale-oriented: while having a bias to action and impact, you will care about scalable infrastructure and engineering processes. Even better if you’re able to bring some better practices or improvements to our infrastructure or ways of working! Be able to contribute in our stack: we try to balance speed and impact with fitting the best framework/ technology to the task at hand. Currently, we work primarily in Python / Flask / FastAPI on the backend, Terraform / GCP / AWS for infra, and React / JavaScript / TypeScript / Vercel on the frontend. Ideally, you’ll be able to contribute within our stack while also helping us experiment and evolve to continually improve functionality and performance. Above all else, we value people who want to make an impact in their work. Here are some of the behaviors that we expect of all Herons: Scrappy and creative: when faced with an obstacle, you will either overcome it by pure determination (i.e., by hand), or find an unconventional approach or ‘hack’ to navigate it. Persistent: you may not always find the right answer or person immediately, but you're motivated to keep on trying until you do so. You’ll go the extra mile - including Flying to Gainesville - if that’s what it takes. Pilot not passenger: at a fast-growing company like Heron we need people who jump on opportunities unprompted and drive them to a great outcome, rather than folks who wait to be told what to do. Excited to work in a fast-paced, high-growth, team-based environment: we aim to move quickly and decisively, but together. You’ll be a great team player and do what it takes for the team to succeed. What You Can Expect as a Heron Competitive compensation, including equity Based full-time, and in-person in our NYC office, with occasional travel to customers (across the country) and company retreats (often in London) Your choice of top-of-the-line equipment to fit out your desk in our office Competitive benefits package: health, dental, vision with partial coverage for dependents; 401K; uncapped PTO; parental leave Free mental health support via Spill - on-demand access to therapy Weekly company lunches (always inclusive and vegan-friendly - especially if you like Vietnamese food!) Applicants from any background and gender are welcome and we have a zero tolerance policy on discrimination Technology For Frontend -- our customer dashboard is built with NextJS, using MUI, React, and TypeScript. We deploy our frontend apps on Vercel For Backend -- our backend applications are primarily written in Python using the Flask or FastAPI frameworks. We also use celery for async task processing. We have both a main monolith and also microservices. We containerize & deploy these applications on Kubernetes clusters or on managed compute (serverless) For ML — we have a variety of classification & prediction tasks that we deploy different models for, ranging from classic ML models / NLP techniques to fine-tuned LLMs For infrastructure — we use both GCP and AWS for different components. Some of our main components include Postgres database, Redis and RabbitMQ. All of our code repositories live in GitHub and we use GitHub actions extensively for CI/CD Interview Process Initial screen (20 minutes) - conversation to discuss what you're looking for, what Heron offers, and to see if there's a good fit. Technical screening interview (up to 60 minutes) - interactive technical session with one or two of our engineers where you will review a pull request and then do some live coding to build on it. Team interviews (2-3 hours in total) - mix of technical and behavioral conversations with Heron teammates and founders. You'll get a feel for the people you'll work with and how we approach problems, and we'll get to know how you collaborate, communicate, and think. References - 2 references from people you've worked with who can speak to your impact, working style, and contributions in a professional setting.