Founding Forward Deployed Lead

Unbounded needs a technically fluent, customer-facing operator who can turn complex institutional workflows into clear product requirements, feasible deployments, and measurable customer value. This person bridges customers, the founder, commercial priorities, product decisions, and founding engineers while the company is still defining its approach.

Day to day, you will understand customer workflows, systems, stakeholders, and constraints; identify where AI agents can create value; translate discovery into use cases and implementation plans; partner with engineers on integrations and prototypes; coordinate deployments and adoption; and feed customer insight into product and commercial priorities. The single most important spike is strong customer discovery combined with enough technical depth to assess feasibility and move from ambiguous problem to useful deployment.

What You'll Own

• Develop a deep understanding of customer workflows, systems, stakeholders, and constraints.
• Identify opportunities where AI agents can create measurable business value.
• Translate customer needs into clear use cases, product requirements, and implementation plans.
• Partner with engineers on integrations, prototypes, and deployment decisions.
• Coordinate early deployments, define success measures, and help customers adopt new workflows.
• Bring customer insights into product priorities and commercial discussions.
• Work directly with the founder and founding engineers to shape the company’s customer-deployment approach.

Technical Requirements

• Technical fluency across software systems, APIs, data flows, and integrations.
• Ability to discuss implementation tradeoffs with engineers and explain them clearly to customers.
• Ability to assess technical feasibility and identify questions requiring further investigation.
• Comfort using prototypes, lightweight code, or technical analysis to move work forward.

Execution and Ownership

• Take responsibility for moving ambiguous customer problems toward practical outcomes.
• Work across customer, product, engineering, and commercial priorities.
• Build trust with technical stakeholders, business leaders, and end users.
• Make progress independently while identifying decisions that need engineering or founder input.
• Demonstrate ownership of customer implementations, adoption, or measurable business outcomes.

Background

• Undergraduate degree in engineering, ideally computer science or computer engineering.
• Experience in product or a commercial role involving close collaboration with customers and technical teams.
• Evidence of translating complex needs into products, implementations, or customer outcomes.
• Relevant experience may come from startups, technical product roles, solutions work, or building a company..

Location and Visa

• Full-time, in-office role.
• New York is preferred; San Francisco or Toronto are also preferred locations.
• Candidates elsewhere may be considered if willing to relocate; permanent unwillingness to relocate is difficult for the first hires.
• Visa sponsorship and permitted work-authorization statuses are — pending / confirm.

Nice to Have

• Experience deploying AI products in enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with regulated industries or complex organizational workflows.
• Experience supporting customer discovery, adoption, or commercial opportunities.
• Prior entrepreneurial experience.
• Ability to build functional prototypes independently.
• Early-stage startup experience spanning customers, product, and engineering.

Who Will Thrive Here You are technically curious, commercially thoughtful, and comfortable working closely with customers in an ambiguous early-stage environment. You enjoy understanding how an organization operates, asking precise questions, taking ownership, and turning a promising use case into a useful deployment. You should be motivated by building the customer-facing foundation of a consequential company rather than by a narrowly defined role.