Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Justworks
Toronto
Who We Are
At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.
We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.
We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.
If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
About Justworks
Justworks helps U.S. small businesses run payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance in one platform. Justworks International extends that globally, giving 12,000+ U.S. SMBs a single partner to hire and pay people in 40+ countries through our Employer of Record (EOR) and international contractor products, and take care of teams through market leading benefits solutions. We're growing fast, and we’re re-designing how we work AI-first to empower teams to do their best work and build more valuable solutions for our customers and their teams around the world.
About the role
Every enterprise will soon need teams who figure out where AI agents can drive leverage inside a team, redesign workflows around it, wire up the systems, and run the agents in production. This role is that person for Justworks International.
EOR is a dense set of workflows running on structured compliance data, customer data, and tribal knowledge. Almost every team - Ops, CS, Finance, Legal - has workflows where agents could process orders of magnitude more volume, compress cycle times from days to minutes, and free humans for the judgment-heavy work. We need someone who can find those workflows, rebuild them, and run them.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work closely with business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows around it, and turn those gains into durable systems. This is not a research role or a strategy-deck role. It's a builder-operator role with full autonomy to connect systems, deploy agents, and ship transformation.
What You'll Do
Find the leverage. Sit with teams, map how work actually gets done, and identify the workflows where in-house agents unlock improvements. Act as researcher and consultant - understand and document the end-to-end impact on both our teams and our customers of deploying AI agents to automate manual work.
Design the future state. Redesign workflows around what agents can do. Define where humans stay in the loop and why. Map data flows, agent context requirements, and handoff points. Turn messy, tribal processes into something an agent can execute. Work closely with the AI capabilities team that builds the technology, infrastructure, and knowledge layer for Justworks International.
Wire it up. Connect workflows across business systems and ship directly alongside the AI capabilities team.
Ship agents to production. Deploy agents, define evals for every workflow, re-run evals after model or data changes. Monitor quality, cost, latency, and outcomes. Stay close to team needs and how deployments change their work.
Run agents as products. Own the KPIs: volume handled, time saved, quality, cost per task, escalation rate, business outcomes. Hold weekly reviews. Close the loop with the teams whose workflows you transformed.
Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with the AI capabilities team, Ops, CS, and business leadership. You're embedded in the business function, not siloed inside IT or a central AI team.
Who You Are
You are a builder. You communicate business impact, not just technical detail. You can sit with a CS lead for an hour and leave with a clear map of the three workflows most worth rebuilding, then go wire them up yourself with modern agent tooling. You've probably been called "the technical person on a business team" or "the business person on a technical team".
You are scrappy and resourceful. You don't need a roadmap handed to you. You find the highest-leverage problem and start solving it. You proactively identify solutions and unblock yourself without a fully defined path. You have a bias to shipping and a low tolerance for blockers.
You are product-minded. You look beyond the immediate task to understand the "why" behind the build. You question whether it's the right solution before building it. You balance quality with speed - you know when to optimize for durability and when to iterate fast.
You have a learning mindset. You're comfortable in a fast-paced, early-stage environment where best practices are being invented in real time. You read what's happening in AI daily, you've built things with agents on your own time, and you have opinions about what works.
You demonstrate ownership. You identify gaps and drive initiatives to completion without waiting for explicit instructions. When you encounter ambiguity, you address it directly.
Must-Haves
- 5+ years in a role combining business operations or process design with hands-on technical execution - solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, founding team at a startup, strategy & ops, or internal tools/automation lead.
- Workflow design chops. You can map a business workflow end-to-end, identify where value is trapped, and redesign it. You are a systems thinker who can abstract the interconnectedness of how things work. You have concrete examples of measurable efficiency or revenue impact.
- Technical fluency. Comfortable in the terminal, reading and writing code, working with APIs, webhooks, and data pipelines. You don't need to be a senior engineer — you need to be unblocked by technical work.
- Real agent experience. You've built something non-trivial with LLMs and agents (at work or on the side). You understand prompts, tools, context windows, evals, retrieval, and the difference between a demo and production.
- Modern AI stack familiarity. Agent frameworks, MCP servers, vector databases, workflow orchestration, eval tooling.
- Operator instincts. You run a tight cadence, track outcomes, hold yourself accountable to KPIs, and communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders.
- Judgment under autonomy. Flawless business judgment. You keep our values and customer needs at the forefront of every decision.
Nice-to-Haves
- Forward-deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or deployed AI role at a frontier lab, AI infra company, a saas company or applied AI team.
- Former founder or early-stage employee - you know what it means to find and solve around customer pain points.
- Background in EOR, payroll, HR tech, fintech, or B2B SaaS for SMBs.
- Built internal agents, automations, or knowledge bases used by real teams.
- International experience or background
Technologies Used
- Golang, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Java, C#, Python, VueJS, MySQL, Kafka, AWS, Git, Memcache, Redis, ElasticSearch, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, CircleCI, DataDog
The base wage range for this position based in our Toronto office is targeted at $167,500.00 to $235,000.00 CAD per year.
#LI-AD1 #LI-Hybrid #LI-JS1
Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location. Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location.
For more information about Justworks’ Total Reward Philosophy, including all of the perks and benefits we are proud to offer our team members, please visit Total Rewards @ Justworks.
Diversity At Justworks
Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on their sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If you're in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Your comfort and success matter to us, and we're here to ensure an inclusive experience.
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