Location: NYC (Preferred) or SF Hybrid - (25-50% Travel Due to Customers being in Law Enforcement)
Salary / Hourly Rate: $85,000 - $150,000 per year
Benefits: U.S.-based role with visa sponsorship available for strong candidates. (NO H1Bs),Equity: 0.20% - 1.00%,Bonuses based on company performance,We contribute 3% to your 401(k), regardless of your own contribution,Unlimited PTO,Paid Short- & Long-term Disability Insurance,Paid Life Insurance,Criminal Justice Ready: Given the sensitivity of our work, we support employees through FBI background checks / CJIS clearance process as needed.,Exceptional candidates outside NYC/SF will be considered but should expect 50-75% travel to customer sites.
Role Information
Role Overview: N/A
Responsibilities: This is a founding Forward-Deployed Engineer role. You sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and the field. You'll embed directly with detectives, analysts, and prosecutors, learn their workflows, and use that context to deploy Closure's platform and shape the roadmap.Live with users. Apply your engineering skills to real-world user problems, directly with the people who use the product. Spend significant time on-site with law-enforcement customers — watching how they investigate cases and where evidence review slows them down.Solve pre-scale problems. You're a strong engineer who's comfortable building things that don't scale — one-off analyses, custom integrations, scrappy fixes that unblock a customer today. Deploy and configure Closure for new agencies, load and validate data, and make sure investigators can rely on it every day.Turn customer pain into product. Translate what you see in the field into concrete product ideas, then partner closely with the founders to ship them. You're an executor who turns user pain into PRs (or into a clear understanding of what we need to build next).Ship full-stack features. Build in Python, React, TypeScript, and AI/ML APIs — from new workflows in the UI to backend improvements that make evidence search faster and more reliable.Own pilots end to end. Run deployments, training sessions, and rollouts so new departments can adopt Closure smoothly. Act as the trusted technical partner for investigators and leadership teams.
Qualifications: 3+ years of full-stack software engineering experience shipping production features, Strong proficiency in Python and a modern frontend stack (TypeScript/React or similar), Experience building on top of AI/ML APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar), Comfortable working across the stack — frontend UI to backend services, Prior experience in roles like forward-deployed engineer, solutions engineer, founding/early engineer, or similar — where you regularly met with users and incorporated their feedback, Ability to translate messy real-world requirements into clear product and technical decisions, Strong communication skills — can explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders (detectives, prosecutors, agency leadership), High ownership — comfortable owning deployments end-to-end, from kickoff through training and ongoing support, Excited by ambiguity, rapid iteration, and small-team environments, Mission-driven and motivated by impact on public safety and the criminal-justice system, Willing to travel 25–75% of the time to be on-site with law-enforcement customers across the U.S., Experience deploying software in regulated or sensitive environments (gov, defense, healthcare, fintech), Familiarity with RAG, vector search, or LLM-powered applications, Prior exposure to public sector or law-enforcement workflows, Ability/willingness to go through CJIS clearance and FBI background checks
Minimum Requirements: 3+ years of professional software engineering experience working across the stack (backend + frontend) and shipping production features in a modern web stack (e.g., Python, TypeScript/React, or similar).,Comfort working directly with customers or end users – you’ve been in roles like solutions engineer, forward-deployed engineer, founder/early engineer, or similar where you regularly met with users and incorporated their feedback.,Willingness to travel 25–75% of the time to visit law-enforcement agencies and work with investigators on-site as needed.,High ownership and startup mindset – experience in small, fast-paced teams where you’ve worn multiple hats, worked with ambiguity, and owned projects end-to-end.,Strong communication skills – able to translate between technical details and non-technical stakeholders (detectives, prosecutors, agency leadership).
Screening Questions: N/A
Company Information
About Company: N/A
Culture: N/A
Additional Information
Interview Process: Initial Call (30 min) – Introductory conversation with a founder to learn more about your background, walk through the role, and assess mutual fit., Technical Deep Dive (60–75 min) – Live discussion with an engineer covering your experience building and shipping products, system-design style questions, and how you’ve handled messy real-world requirements., Practical Exercise / Case Study (60–90 min) – Short take-home or live exercise focused on how you’d approach a forward-deployed problem (e.g., understanding a customer workflow and translating it into product/technical changes)., Final Round (60–90 min) – Conversations with founders and team members to go deeper on collaboration style, working with customers, mission alignment, and any remaining technical topics.
Day to day: Embedding on-site with detectives, analysts, and prosecutors to watch how they investigate cases, understand their workflows, and uncover pain points., Deploying and configuring Closure’s platform for new departments, loading data, troubleshooting issues, and making sure investigators can rely on the system in day-to-day work., Translating what you see in the field into clear product ideas and engineering tasks, then building and shipping full-stack features using Python, React, TypeScript, and AI/ML APIs., Owning pilots end-to-end: planning deployment, running training sessions, gathering feedback, and iterating quickly with the founding team., Traveling regularly (25–75% of your time) to customer sites across the U.S. while staying tightly looped in with the core team in New York.
Team: You’ll report directly to Aaron Zelinger (Co-founder) and work closely with the other founders on both product and customer work., The team is lean, highly technical, and mission-driven — everyone ships code, talks to users, and contributes to product direction., As one of the first Forward-Deployed Engineers, you’ll shape how the FDE function works at Closure, from playbooks for deployments to how feedback flows back into the roadmap.
Growth: Own critical customer deployments and relationships from day one, becoming the go-to technical partner for some of Closure’s key law-enforcement agencies., Directly influence product direction by bringing field context to every roadmap discussion and helping decide what gets built next., Help define and later scale the Forward-Deployed Engineering function — including processes, tooling, and eventually mentoring or leading additional FDEs as the team grows., Build a rare track record of high-impact, user-embedded engineering work at a YC-backed, seed-stage startup tackling complex, real-world problems.
Ideal Candidate Profile: Field-Driven Engineer – Strong full-stack engineer (Python + modern frontend) who enjoys leaving the office, sitting with users, and seeing how software actually gets used in the wild., Customer-Obsessed Problem Solver – Comfortable building trust with detectives and agency leadership, asking good questions, and turning messy requirements into clear product and technical decisions., High-Ownership Operator – Thrives in tiny, fast-moving teams, takes full responsibility for deployments and outcomes, and is happy to do whatever the situation requires (from debugging to running training sessions)., Mission-Motivated – Energized by improving public safety and the criminal-justice system, and comfortable working with sensitive, sometimes difficult case material., Startup-Ready – Has prior experience in early-stage or talent-dense environments and is excited by ambiguity, rapid iteration, and having a big say in how the product and company evolve., Kelly Jones — Forward Deployed Engineer @ Palantir, Columbia University. Owns end-to-end delivery of high-stakes customer projects, embedding directly with clients to architect and build solutions., Tina Wu — Founding Forward Deployed Engineer @ Closure, Northeastern University (CS & Cyber Operations). Previously founding-stage engineer at Cinder (trust & safety) where she owned the architecture and delivery of the core content review platform, grew from 0 to 30+ customers, led a team of 5 engineers, and served as FDE working directly with customers to scope solutions, ship features, and increase contract size by 8x. Owned the full product lifecycle from customer discovery through implementation with no clear requirements or precedent. Before Cinder, full-stack and DevOps engineer at Mark43 (public safety software). Background in law enforcement: Crime Prevention Assistant at Northeastern University Police Department, Explorer at Fullerton Police Department.
