Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract)

realfast is an applied-AI strategy and engineering firm. We help software-driven enterprises turn urgent, high-stakes problems into products and platforms that move the metric. Founded by the team that scaled Gojek and backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) and RTP Global. We started after ChatGPT, not before it, so there was never an old machine to retrofit. Every role, every process, every metric assumes agents do the grunt work and people do the judgment. Our people don't start from a blank repository — they build on Exo, our applied-AI platform, which is why four or five of them ship like a much larger team. We hire for judgment, because everything that doesn't require it is already automated. What's left is the job. Put more precisely: we hire people who have a high need for cognition. David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic : “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.” His other line from that piece: when intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. That’s what we’re hiring for. We hire forward deployed engineers full-time and on contract . Some of the best engineers we've worked with don't want a full-time job, and we'd rather work with them on their terms than not at all. It suits us as well: contract lets us size a team to the work instead of to headcount. The bar doesn't move either way — same assignment, same rounds, same standard once you're in. Here's what we're looking for A hacker-coded engineer - someone who'd rather build the tool than wait for it. You've shipped in ambiguous environments. You've picked up unfamiliar stacks and made them work. You've sat with a customer, figured out what actually matters, and built the thing that moved the number. You understand why the business cares about what you're building - not just how to build it. You've already started using AI agents and coding assistants to do work better - faster, at a quality level that wasn't possible eighteen months ago. Here, you take that all the way. The problems change constantly - Salesforce integrations one week, data pipelines the next, an AI agent the week after. You're embedded in client delivery, working directly with the founders, shipping production software that hits SLAs and moves metrics the client cares about. What stays constant: you ship fast and to a high bar. Beautiful work done quickly. Everything else is negotiable. What you'll do Build stuff that solves real problems - directly with customers, using whatever tech gets the job done best Get your hands dirty across front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models Operate in cockpit mode. You steer. Your agents execute. Claude Code, Codex, and others write code, run tests, open PRs, update tickets, read and prioritise your email - GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Ashby, calendar, all of it. You engage with these systems through your agents, not around them Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast Have room to chase rabbit holes that might unlock a better way to build Help us hire by spotting people who can operate at this speed What you'll bring 3-5 years of software engineering experience Strong coding skills across multiple languages - which ones don't matter, but discipline and craft do Appreciation for how businesses make money with software Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments Deep mastery of your craft — engineering, BA, QA, design, whatever your domain. You know good from mediocre on sight. Without that judgement, you can't raise an agent's bar, and raising the bar is the job You're comfortable in a terminal. Not a shell wizard