Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Onyx (W24)
$130K - $250K  ‱  0.10% - 1.00%
Open Source AI Assistant and Enterprise Search
San Francisco, CA, US
Full-time
1+ years
About Onyx

Onyx is the open source GenAI platform connected to your company's docs, apps, and people. We ingest and sync from all sources of information (Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Confluence, Salesforce, etc.) to provide a centralized place for users to ask about anything. Imagine your most knowledgeable co-workers, all-rolled into one, and available 24/7!

We believe that every modern team will be adopting knowledge enhanced GenAI within the next 5 years and it is our goal to bring this technology to all the teams of the world.

We raised a $10M seed coming out of YCombinator, backed by Khosla Ventures (early/seed backers of OpenAI, Doordash, GitLab, etc.) and First Round Capital (Notion, Square, Roblox, etc.). Our customers include of the best teams in the world like Netflix, Ramp, Applied Intuition and dozens of others. We also have incredible open source users like Roku, Zendesk, L3Harris and more.

About the role
Skills: Kubernetes, Google Cloud, Docker, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

đŸ’„Â Your impact

Onyx is a popular open source project with hundreds of thousands of users. The project has over 10K stars and over 3K community members across Slack and Discord (these stats may already be out of date when you read this). Many new teams want to use Onyx within their organization but don’t have the technical know-how to make this happen; your work will enable massively more adoption. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to build out and lead the technical sales organization.

💡 About the role

As our first Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:

  • Act as the primary technical advisor to Onyx’s rapidly growing customer base, providing expert support and building strong relationships
  • Guide customers through their self-hosted deployments across different clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) and deployment methods (Docker Compose, Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Helm, etc.)
  • Debug and patch tricky, deployment-specific issues with customers
  • Help grow the open source community through improvements in the deployment process and related documentation
  • Contribute features to eliminate common setup issues
  • Work with customers to find the best use cases for Onyx, maximizing our impact and value
  • Be the voice of the customer and bridge the gap between customers and product. Relay product insights and customer feedback to founders/engineering and help shape the direction of product

🚀 You’ll be successful if you


  • Are familiar with Docker/Kubernetes, cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, Azure), and on-prem/cloud deployments. This is a must have!
  • Have previously worked as a Deployed Engineer, Customer Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or DevOps.
  • Excellent communication skills, with a strong ability to collaborate with others (both teammates and external customers). Ability to explain complex engineering/infrastructure concepts to customers in a simple way and root-cause deployment issues.
  • Experience working in a fast-moving startup where there are no standard playbooks in this area.

⭐ Bonus points

  • You’ve worked closely with customers to help them self-host software on their own infrastructure
  • Experience with technical writing / large scale documentation
  • Experience with Typescript/React/NextJS, Python, Relational DB (Postgres), and Vespa or Elasticsearch
Technology

Technical Challenges:

  • Information retrieval at scale
  • Access controls, scalability, high availability, data freshness, etc.
  • Building the optimal UX for knowledge enhanced GenAI
  • LLM based knowledge graphs, multi-hop queries, aggregation type query handling
  • Semantic representation of the organization, subject matter experts, and major topics
  • Learn from user feedback
  • Personalized search
  • [Future] Code search, NL-to-SQL, Excel/Sheets calculations

Tech Stack: Typescript/NextJS, Python, Postgres, Redis, Docker/Kubernetes

AI Stack: Transformers and deep learning, RAG, knowledge graphs, LLM based agent, search engine/vector database

Interview Process
  • Non-technical Phone Screen (30 mins)
  • Mock Deployment Debugging (technical, 45 mins)
  • Work Trial (2 days, fully covered + compensated)

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