Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

We’re looking for a top-tier Forward Deployed Engineer to join Linkup and work hand-in-hand with our founders, customers, and partners. This is our first hire at this role.

Your mission: help leading AI companies, developers, and enterprises integrate Linkup’s AI-ready search APIs into their products — and shape how the next generation of AI agents connects to the web.

This is a highly cross-functional role. You’ll operate at the intersection of engineering, GTM, and customer success
, turning technical integrations into insights that drive our product roadmap, marketing narratives, and outbound strategy.

You’ll be the connective bridge between what customers build with Linkup and how we tell that story to the world.

• Work directly with customers and partners to design, prototype, and deploy integrations of Linkup’s APIs into real-world agentic systems.

• Participate in pre-sales efforts — technical discovery, proof-of-concept design, demo environments.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with backend, ML, and product teams to ensure performance and reliability at scale.

• Partner with the GTM Engineer and Dev Rel team to turn customer learnings into automation, tutorials, and playbooks.

• Identify and implement technical integrations with our other partners
  **** in the value chain (workflow orchestration, AI frameworks, etc.)

• Translate complex technical concepts into clear explanations for both developers and business audiences.

Every integration you build helps define how AI systems connect to live, trusted information
.

You’ll operate on the frontier between customers and product — bringing the voice of the field into everything we build and say.

Your work will inform:

• The stories we tell in marketing.

• The use cases we automate in our GTM systems.

• The features we prioritize in our roadmap.

If you love blending engineering with impact — building things users actually depend on — this role is for you.

• 4+ years in technical support engineering
  , software engineering
  , or solutions engineering
  , with direct application development experience.

• Strong API integration skills — able to design and debug REST/JSON payloads, manage auth flows, and optimize latency.

• Understand web infrastructure, distributed systems, or retrieval pipelines.

• Are comfortable debugging integrations and solving ambiguous technical challenges in customer environments.

• Communicate clearly and empathetically with both technical and business audiences.

• Are curious about AI infrastructure, retrieval, and the emerging agentic ecosystem.

• Thrive in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment.

• Help a partner integrate Linkup’s /search endpoint into their multi-agent workflow.

• Build a proof-of-concept combining a customer’s private data with Linkup’s real-time web results.

• Collaborate with the backend team to improve SDK telemetry and enterprise deployment reliability.

• Work with the GTM team to turn successful integrations into published use cases and reference architectures.

• Identify recurring customer needs that can become productized templates or automation.

We believe in a future of AI agents and the agentic web
. These digital entities can create more value for humanity than we ever could alone, but they depend on the internet to operate, collaborate, take action, and gather information.

AI agents need web search
. To perform well, they require information that is current, reliable, and context‑specific—not the diffuse, steadily aging knowledge frozen at their last training cut‑off.

Modern web search is built for humans, not AIs
. Instead of trusted facts, it serves links, ads, and click‑bait. People want visually engaging pages; AI systems need structured truth. An AI can absorb oceans of data, while human attention barely skims the surface. Humans think visually and intuitively; AI reasons in latent space.

Web 2.0 is sun setting
. The deck is being reshuffled, and the Bing‑Google search oligopoly is crumbling. Indexing ever more pages is no longer the goal; semantically organizing facts for AI systems is. In the coming agentic web, Google’s ad‑driven model…