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Forward-Deployed Engineer at Forum Ventures in Chicago
Job Description
Full-time · Chicago, IL (with travel to customer fleet sites)
About Elmeeda
Elmeeda is the decision and coordination layer for American trucking. Every fleet runs 5–12 systems that don't talk to each other — telematics, TMS, maintenance, fuel, compliance — and today the fleet manager is the integration. Our AI reads every system and acts: when a truck throws a fault code 600 miles from base, Elmeeda assesses severity, picks the shop, calls the vendor, books the bay, files the warranty claim, recovers the load, and notifies the customer. We're live across multiple contracted fleets and deploying with a top-10 US carrier (10,000+ trucks). We're a Palantir Startup Fellowship company, winners of Palantir's DevCon hackathon, and backed by investors across AI, defense ontology, and fleet innovation.
The role
This is not a build-from-the-office job. You'll embed directly with enterprise fleet customers — sitting with maintenance directors, dispatchers, and shop managers — to understand their workflows, then ship working software the same week. You'll build integrations across telematics, TMS, and maintenance systems, design agent workflows on top of messy real-world fleet data, and own deployments end to end: from first discovery conversation to production running on thousands of trucks.
Must-have
Real logistics/trucking/supply chain experience — you've worked in or built for fleets, carriers, brokers, 3PLs, or fleet maintenance and understand how trucking operations actually run
Expert, daily-driver fluency with AI-native development tools — Claude Code, Codex, and agentic coding workflows are how you build, not something you're "familiar with." You should be able to demonstrate this live
Strong full-stack engineering with a bias for integrations: REST/webhook APIs, data pipelines, third-party systems (telematics, TMS, maintenance platforms)
Extremely high energy and customer-facing confidence — comfortable presenting to a VP of Maintenance in the morning and shipping the fix that afternoon
Extreme ownership — you run at ambiguity, don't wait for specs, and treat the customer's problem as yours
Nice-to-have
Prior forward-deployed experience (Palantir-style FDE / deployment strategist, or equivalent embedded customer engineering)
GCP
Palantir AIP / Foundry — ontology-driven data modeling and operational AI
Voice AI: ElevenLabs and Twilio
Why this role
You'll be the first deployment-side engineering hire at a company going from first enterprise contract to industry standard, working directly with the founders. Your work runs on real trucks moving real freight from week one.