Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About Hamilton

Hamilton is building the operating system for charter aviation. Brokers, operators, and their customers rely on us to quote, book, and manage flights — and the current state of tooling in this industry is, to put it politely, decades behind. We're a small, senior team fixing that with modern software and AI.

We're ~10 people. Everyone ships. No one hides behind a process doc.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer — someone who's equal parts engineer, designer, and product thinker. You'll work directly with our customers (charter brokers and operators), understand their problems firsthand, and build solutions fast. Think: prototype on Monday, in a customer's hands by Wednesday, iterated and shipped by Friday.

This isn't a "pick up tickets from a backlog" kind of job. You'll own problems end-to-end — from the messy "what should we even build?" phase through to production code that real people depend on. You'll be the person who turns a customer conversation into a working product.

Your day-to-day looks like:

• Talking to customers. Regularly. Not through a PM — directly. You'll sit on calls, watch them work, and build real intuition for their world so you're solving the right problems.

• Building POCs and prototypes at speed. You're the person who can go from whiteboard sketch to clickable prototype in a day. We use AI tooling aggressively and expect you to as well.

• Shipping features that customers interact with directly. The product lives in the browser and you'll own large parts of the experience — we use React/Next.js, but the point is building things people love, not pixel-pushing.

• Making product decisions. We don't have a 40-person PM org handing you specs. You'll decide what to build, how it should work, and what "done" looks like — then validate that with real users.

• Going wherever the problem takes you. Most of your time will be on customer-facing product and rapid prototyping, but you won't stop at the frontend boundary when the solution requires going deeper.

You Should Have

• 5-8 years of experience building products, with a meaningful chunk of that at startups or in small teams where you owned outcomes, not just outputs.

• Strong product engineering skills — we work in React/Next.js with TypeScript/Node.js, and you should be comfortable across the stack. Frontend is where most of the action is, but this is a "build whatever's needed" role.

• A track record of shipping things that people actually use, not just things that passed code review.

• The instinct to talk to users before (and after) you build. You get energy from customer conversations, not dread.

• Comfort with ambiguity. We're a startup. The roadmap changes. You're the type who finds that exciting, not stressful.

• Strong design taste. You don't need to be a designer, but you know when something feels right and when it doesn't. You sweat the details that users notice.

Bonus Points

• You've built products in complex, regulated, or operationally-heavy industries (aviation, logistics, fintech, healthcare).

• You've worked with AI/LLM-powered features in production — not just demos.

• You've done customer-facing work before: onboarding calls, demos, support. You've been the person a customer Slacks when something's broken.

• You have opinions about product development and can articulate them clearly. You've shipped something you're proud of and can walk us through the decisions you made.

You Probably Won't Enjoy This Role If

• You prefer working from detailed specs and designs.

• You want to go deep on a single technical domain (this is a breadth role).

• Customer calls feel like a chore, not fuel.

• You optimize for clean architecture over shipping and learning.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity in an early-stage company

• Hybrid team — flexibility to work remotely with regular in-person collaboration

• A say in what we build and how we build it — this isn't a "just execute" role

• The chance to define what "Forward Deployed Engineer" means at Hamilton from day one

• Small team energy — low process, high trust, fast decisions

Hamilton is building critical infrastructure for an industry that moves billions of dollars on phone calls and spreadsheets. If that sounds like a problem worth solving, we'd love to talk.