Forward Deployed Engineer, Athena

About us

Humaans is building the next generation of infrastructure for the workplace; software designed for companies that are scaling fast, operating globally, and pushing into new boundaries.

What started as a system of record has evolved into a broader platform for operating people globally. With Athena, our agentic AI layer, Humaans moves beyond data management into intelligent orchestration, connecting workflows across HR, IT, Finance, and Operations so organisations can act faster and with greater confidence, redefining how work gets done.

We work with ambitious teams across Europe and the US, from AI-native companies like Lovable, Poolside, Fyxer AI, and Tandem Health, to established, high-growth organisations scaling internationally and through acquisition, including Quantexa, Sellpy, Manychat, Gigs, Croud, and Threecolts. These teams don’t buy software for features,they buy leverage. The ability to run faster, cleaner, and with more control as complexity compounds.

To date, we’ve raised $20m in venture funding from some of the most respected founders, operators, and funds in technology: Lachy Groom (Physical Intelligence), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Tobias Lütke (Shopify), Dylan Field (Figma), Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), Claire Johnson (Stripe), Oliver Jay (OpenAI), Jay Simmons (Bond) as well as Y Combinator, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, Pathlight Ventures, and Exor.

If you have massive ambition and want to work on a hard problem, with a small team that moves fast, at a moment when the category is genuinely up for grabs - this is it.

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll work alongside a Delivery Lead on a portfolio of Athena customers, staying with them from first deployment through ongoing expansion.

The Delivery Lead owns the customer relationship and priorities. You own turning those requirements into working, deployed Athena agents and jobs, and keeping them running. You’re part of engineering, you just sit closest to the customer. This is a hands-on engineering role with substantial customer interaction.

What you’ll do

• Build the product around the customer. Work directly in the Athena codebase, building the tools, integrations and features each customer needs, and ship to production every day.

• Turn requirements into live agents. Pick up requirements from the Delivery Lead, agree priorities together, then configure agents and jobs, connect integrations and add any missing data.

• Ship with confidence. Write evals, QA every release and demo it to the customer alongside the Delivery Lead.

• Own it in production. Monitor how your agents perform, debug what breaks and fix the root cause. When customers ask technical questions in their channel, you answer.

• Be the tech lead in the room. Lead the technical and product side of customer calls: scope what’s possible, explain how it works and commit to what you’ll build.

• Shape what’s next. Use what you see in production to find each customer’s next use case.

What we’re looking for

• Multiple years of industry experience building production software, ideally within SaaS

• Strong TypeScript knowledge and confidence building and debugging API integrations

• Hands-on experience with LLM applications: prompting, tool calling, retrieval and evaluating model behaviour

• Experience with authentication, authorisation and handling sensitive data across connected systems

• Comfort working directly with customers, explaining technical trade-offs clearly to both engineers and operational teams

• The ability to take an ambiguous business process and turn it into a working, deployed solution

• A proven track record of shipping work that made a real difference to customers

• A high degree of ownership: you follow problems through to the root cause, surface blockers early and keep commitments you make to customers

• Comfort juggling several customers and switching between building, debugging and customer conversations as priorities shift

Helpful experience

• HRIS, ATS, payroll, identity or other enterprise business systems

• People operations processes such as onboarding, offboarding, time away and employee requests

• Agent orchestration, MCP or workflow automation

• Production monitoring, integration testing and AI evaluations

You may not be a great fit if

• You’d rather stay removed from customers than be on their calls and in their channels

• You prefer deep focus on one long project over moving between several customers at once

• You see production support and debugging as someone else’s job once code is shipped

• You’re more interested in technical complexity than whether the customer’s problem actually gets solved

• You’re uncomfortable committing to timelines in front of a customer and being accountable for hitting them

Our tech stack

Our tech stack today consists of TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Node, Postgres and Redis. We use GitHub for code and continuous integration to deploy to Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform. We have a public REST API and our browser client uses a realtime WebSocket API.

This is an in-person role. Our team comes together in the office Monday through Thursday, while most of the team collaborates in person on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

Package & Benefits

Early stage startups can be messy – we know that. We're putting effort in providing you with the best employee experience and a quality driven environment in exchange for trusting us.

• Market-leading compensation that reflects your value

• 25 days paid time off each year plus public holidays

• Share Options with 5-year exercise window so you don’t feel pressure to exercise if you leave

• Quarterly team events, and company offsites

• Top tier private coverage for health, vision and dental care

• A new MacBook and tools you need to do your best work

• Enhanced parental leave with up to 16 weeks for primary and 4 weeks for secondary

• Learning & development budget

Why Join Humaans Today?

HR tech is having its AI moment and we’re positioned to own it. Humaans started as a next-gen HRIS taking on large incumbents in a massive market. We’ve since evolved into something even bigger: an AI platform that sits across workforce data and automates the operational layer of HR entirely; the natural progression of what we’ve been building toward.

The product is highly differentiated. It’s built around a structured workforce data model that makes AI reliable in an HR context, something no one else has gotten right. Customers notice the difference immediately.

We’re backed by Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, and operators who’ve built some of the most consequential software companies of the last decade: the founders of Slack, Figma, and Shopify, and Asana’s former CRO and Head of OpenAI International.

We’re a small team with an unapologetically high bar. It shows up in the product, in how we communicate, and in the standards we hold each other to.

Our Commitment to Diversity

At Humaans we’re looking for genuinely good people that are transparent and emphatic. We’re committed to providing equal opportunities, a diverse and inclusive work environment, and ensuring a fair interview process for everyone. You’re welcome to apply no matter your gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

Privacy notice

We care about your privacy. When you apply for a role at Humaans, we’ll collect and process your personal data as part of our recruitment process. This includes things like your CV, contact details, and any other information you choose to share. We may also contact you about future opportunities. You can ask us to delete your data at any time. For more details, see our Privacy Policy.