Forward Deployed Engineer
Footprint·Mid-level·On-site · New York City·$170k–$205k USD
Posted Oct 18, 2026·footprint.com
Footprint is the agentic platform that learns your compliance program and runs it end to end.
Compliance teams at banks and fintechs are drowning in financial crimes investigations. Transaction volumes are surging, regulators keep raising the bar, and the work still runs on manual review queues stitched together from legacy vendors. Percy, our agentic system, learns each team's procedures and makes the same calls their analysts would: clearing false positives, escalating real risk, writing the case narrative, and documenting every decision for audit. It cuts review workloads by 70%+.
The harder problem is underneath. Every investigation is grounded in the data sources compliance teams already trust, and every case commits to an organizational memory that compounds — so a pattern one analyst caught in March surfaces automatically in October, across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. Whether the team is five analysts or 500, they share one brain. Every memory carries provenance. Agents propose; humans approve. That's four years of identity infrastructure sitting under the agent, and it's the part nobody can bolt on later.
We're backed by QED, Index, and Box Group, and trusted by FDIC- and OCC-regulated banks plus fintechs like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.
The Role
Percy runs financial-crime investigations inside our customers' operations, against their own procedures, on their real data. Getting each new customer from the first technical conversation to production - connected, configured, proven against their own analysts, trusted - is a real engineering job, and today the engineers who build Percy are the ones doing it.
Footprint is signing customers fast enough that this needs to be someone's whole job. That's this role.
You'll embed with banks and fintechs to learn how they run investigations, then implement Percy and build the agents that do the work against their procedures. You configure and extend the product itself; per-account bespoke builds are out of scope. When a customer hits an edge case, you'll engineer a clever solution to solve their problem and simultaneously improve the product for the future.
You'll report directly to the CTO - Alex Grinman.
What You'll Own
- Percy implementations. Lead the technical deployment and integration of Percy into a customer's environment, from first API call to their analysts trusting the output
- The agents. Configure and build the Percy agents that carry out each customer's investigation procedures, and iterate with them until the output is trusted and production-ready
- The backtests. Run Percy against the customer's own historical cases and show them how its decisions compare to the calls their analysts already made. This is the work that earns a go-live, and it's yours end to end
- Whatever's in the way. Diagnose and resolve the bugs and edge cases customers hit, debugging across the stack and partnering with core engineering on deeper fixes
- The customer relationship, on the technical side. Be the engineer customers rely on during and after rollout - credible, and relentless about getting them to a working solution
- The loop back to product. Bring the patterns, gaps, and feature needs you see in the field back to the team. You're the reason a feature gets built before the third customer asks for it
- Repeatability. The tooling, templates, and patterns that make each implementation faster than the last are yours to build
Stack
Python · TypeScript · Rust · SQL · graph and memory systems · the Percy agent tooling · customer APIs and data pipelines
Deep experience with most of this, and the judgment to pick up the rest, is what matters.
Must-Have
- 2–4 years building software, ideally including time in a customer-facing, solutions, or implementation engineering role
- Genuinely strong in at least one of Python, TypeScript, Rust, Java, C++, or any other well established language, and able to pick up an unfamiliar stack to get a customer unblocked
- A rigorous engineering foundation you can demonstrate - you reason from first principles about systems you've never seen before
- You've debugged a problem across a boundary you didn't control: someone else's API, someone else's data, someone else's environment
- Familiarity with AI/LLM agents and how to configure, build, or prompt them effectively
- You communicate clearly and credibly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, turn fuzzy requirements into a concrete plan, and stay calm when a customer is depending on you
- You've been the first person in a role that had no playbook, and wrote the one that replaced it
- You've told a customer something they didn't want to hear and kept the relationship
- Willingness to travel to customer sites
Nice-to-Have
- A forward-deployed, solutions, implementation, or technical consulting role at a startup or enterprise software company - this job is that job, with more ownership
- Exposure to fintech, financial services, compliance, fraud, or AML/KYC. You'd start the first deployment already knowing what an alert and a case actually are
- Experience building and validating integrations end to end: APIs, data pipelines, customer systems. The first two weeks of every deployment are exactly this
