Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.