Forward Deployed Engineer
Zymbly, San Francisco, California +1
Wait…
The role
Airlines can't get new planes fast enough. They're flying older fleets longer, but the mechanics who maintain them are stretched thin and drowning in manual processes. Maintenance downtime is killing profitability.
Zymbly is building the AI-native OS for airline operations. Zymbly plans the maintenance work, handles the admin, and guides mechanics through the physical work to drive up quality, safety, and speed.
Since launching, we've worked with 3 of Europe and the US's top 10 airlines (and have most in the pipeline). We've raised from top investors - stay tuned for an announcement coming soon!
Our founding team has depth across aviation and tech startups - Robbie was a Lead Engineer at Airbus and led Maintenance at Virgin. Ben and Azmat have led teams at top startups backed by General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Gates Foundation.
Our engineers work where our users work: hangars, airport gates, control centres. That's where the product gets built.
You'll be on the ground with airline maintenance teams around the world, often the only Zymbly person on-site. This summer alone we're launching across 5 cities in 3 countries. You'll be operating like a founder with high degree of ownership: earn trust from users, ship new features, and spell out the ROI to leadership.
What you will do
- Understand and improve operations from the inside. Spend time on site (hangar floors, airside, etc.) at customer facilities worldwide, understand their pain points and workflows, translate them into products they love and drive adoption from the first use, through to scale
- Build custom connectors and integrations into messy legacy systems (think: decades-old ERPs that somehow still run everything)
- Shape what to build next. Synthesize ERP data, documentation and on-site observations to drive our product roadmap
- Ship new features to end users and present ROI to airline leadership. You're the face of Zymbly on the ground
- Dive into whatever's hard and important: improve AI evals, solve infrastructure problems, figure out how to scale. If it's blocking us, you can fix it
What you need
- Can balance being a pirate (i.e. you care about shipping features users love), with building systems that work in production
- Thinks AI first – using coding tools but also understanding how models work, their limitations, and building products around these
- A track record of exceptionally high achievement, however that shows up
- Comfortable everywhere. Mechanics on a hangar floor one hour, airline VPs the next. Credible and genuinely curious in both settings
- Willing to travel extensively. Our customers are global. You'll be on planes regularly
- 1+ years of experience, with some 0→1 building: a startup, a side project that shipped with real users, etc.
- Fun to be around. We spend a lot of time together
- Strong with our stack (or able to pick up quickly): Next.js (React/TypeScript), Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL, Vercel, AWS
Reporting to: CTO
Pay and benefits
- Breakfast and lunch at the office, chef-cooked meals
- Dinner delivered if you’re working late at the office
- Top-spec gym in the office
- Uber home if you're working late
- Fortnightly apartment cleaning allowance
- Top-spec MacBook
- Private health insurance (Vitality)
- Pension scheme with employer contributions
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Source: the Y Combinator job board. We last checked this job 3 h ago. We first saw it 4 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now.