Forward Deployed Engineering Lead

Comena builds AI agents for industrial distributors and manufacturers to automate their order processing from e-mail inbox to ERP. At distributors across the US and Germany alone, there are 4 million sales and procurement people stuck in manual workflows between inbox and ERP. We want to automate this work and liberate these people to work on more meaningful things.

We’re part of the YC S25 batch - the most selective batch in YC history. We recently raised a seed round from top Silicon Valley investors, and are serving customers across US and Germany.

Comena is delivering seven-figure deployments for leading industrial companies across the US, UK and the EU.

As our Forward Deployed Engineering Lead, you will own the bridge between our product, engineering team, and customers, defining how Comena is implemented and scaled across organizations.

You will be responsible for ensuring customers successfully adopt Comena, creating scalable processes for implementation, and helping our engineering team move faster by turning customer learnings into clear technical requirements.

This is a high-ownership role combining customer success, engineering, and operational excellence. You will work closely with customers to understand their workflows, coordinate deployments with engineers, identify recurring implementation challenges, and build the systems that allow us to onboard customers faster as we scale.

Customer onboarding and deployment ownership: Lead the full customer implementation lifecycle, from initial discovery through successful production rollout. Own customer onboarding processes, coordinate deployments, and ensure customers successfully adopt Comena’s AI platform. Work closely with customers to understand their workflows, data, and systems, and collaborate with engineers to deliver reliable solutions.

Deployment strategy and process building: Establish the processes, playbooks, and best practices that enable faster and more consistent customer deployments. Identify bottlenecks in onboarding and work with engineering and product teams to improve tooling, documentation, and workflows that make future FDE deployments more efficient.

Cross-functional collaboration: Act as the bridge between customers, founders, and engineers. Translate customer needs and operational challenges into clear technical requirements, coordinate engineering efforts, and ensure alignment between customer expectations and product capabilities.

• Has high agency, can operate independently, and takes ownership of customer outcomes.

• Has excellent communication skills (fluent English and German is a must) and enjoys working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Is comfortable managing complex software deployments and collaborating closely with engineers.

• Can translate customer workflows and business requirements into actionable technical solutions.

• Enjoys building processes from scratch and creating scalable systems for a growing company.

• Has strong problem-solving skills and thrives in ambiguous startup environments.

• Loves startups and running together to make something great happen.

• Wants to work very hard beyond traditional 9-5 hours.

We work with Python (Django), Typescript, Postgres, and the latest LLMs.

• Your work will directly impact workers and companies around the world, to make global supply chains run smoothly.

• We’re keeping our team deliberately small. We believe more people translate to more output if and only if each member is elite.

• You’ll be working with cracked founders. Jiehua was the youngest software engineer at Google Zurich and the first sales hire at Lio (YC S23). Almo shipped code at Microsoft and Amazon AWS, and was the first engineer at Leaping AI (YC W25).

• If you need any perks to feel productive, let us know and we’ll make it happen.

1. 15 min intro call with Youssef

2. 60 min technical interview with Almo

3. Take-home assignment / case study

4. In-person co-working day

5. Offer