What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer position at Leela?
FOUNDING SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER (FORWARD DEPLOYED) — CUSTOMER PIPELINES & SOLUTIONS
Leela is building continuous, agentic regulatory compliance for financial services — replacing manual obligation tracking with AI that reasons about regulations and produces verifiable, trustworthy results.
ABOUT THE ROLE
You're the engineer in the room with the customer. Our platform delivers value once a customer's regulatory landscape is loaded, indexed, and wired in — and you'll own that end to end. You write code, talk to compliance leaders, and turn ambiguous needs into working systems.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
• Build and operate data-ingestion pipelines that bring large volumes of external regulatory data into the platform.
• Integrate messy, multi-format source data (APIs, structured documents, web sources) into a clean, structured model.
• Stand up knowledge / retrieval systems so the platform can answer regulatory questions with precision.
• Map a customer's regulations and obligations into the platform so reviews reflect what they're actually subject to.
• Be the technical bridge — run working sessions with compliance teams and feed real-world friction back to the product.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Must-have
• Strong engineering generalist, comfortable across TypeScript and Python and reading unfamiliar code.
• ML / AI experience — hands-on with AI/LLM SDKs and agentic frameworks (Vercel AI SDK, Anthropic/OpenAI SDKs, LangGraph or similar); research-ML background optional.
• Solid SQL / PostgreSQL and genuine data-integration grit.
• Excellent customer communication and comfort with ambiguity.
• US Citizenship / Permanent Residents only
Nice to have
• Background in regtech, fintech, or another regulated industry.
• Experience with retrieval/embeddings systems or data ingestion/ETL.
• Prior forward-deployed, solutions, or implementation engineering.
SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
Within the first year: independently onboarding customers end to end and defining repeatable playbooks that make each one faster to stand up.