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Forward Deployed Engineer

Engineering·London·Full time·On-site

About us

Humaans is building the next generation of infrastructure for the workplace; software designed for companies that are scaling fast, operating globally, and pushing into new boundaries.

What started as a system of record has evolved into a broader platform for operating people globally. With Athena, our agentic AI layer, Humaans moves beyond data management into intelligent orchestration, connecting workflows across HR, IT, Finance, and Operations so organisations can act faster and with greater confidence, redefining how work gets done.

We work with ambitious teams across Europe and the US, from AI-native companies like Lovable, Poolside, Fyxer AI, and Tandem Health, to established, high-growth organisations scaling internationally and through acquisition, including Quantexa, Sellpy, Manychat, Gigs, Croud, and Threecolts. These teams don’t buy software for features,they buy leverage. The ability to run faster, cleaner, and with more control as complexity compounds.

To date, we’ve raised $20m in venture funding from some of the most respected founders, operators, and funds in technology: Lachy Groom (Physical Intelligence), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Tobias Lütke (Shopify), Dylan Field (Figma), Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), Claire Johnson (Stripe), Oliver Jay (OpenAI), Jay Simmons (Bond) as well as Y Combinator, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, Pathlight Ventures, and Exor.

If you have massive ambition and want to work on a hard problem, with a small team that moves fast, at a moment when the category is genuinely up for grabs - this is it.

About the role

Athena is an agentic AI platform for HR, and the category it sits in is being defined right now. There is no settled playbook for deploying autonomous agents into a real enterprise, with all its messy data, legacy systems and high stakes. You will be one of the people writing it.

This is the role that turns Athena from a product into outcomes inside the companies betting on us. You will be the closest thing Athena has to a founder for each customer you take on: scoping the problem, mapping it to the product, building whatever is missing, and owning the rollout until it is delivering real value. You are the technical authority customers trust, the engineer we put in the room when the questions get hard, and the person whose read on what customers actually need shapes what we build next.

It is the work we have done by hand to land our first enterprise deployments, with customers ranging from AI-native companies to high-growth enterprises, Your job is to do it better, and at scale. Huge ownership and real stakes from week one.

Your day to day

  • Own enterprise rollouts of Athena end to end: partner with our implementation managers to refine requirements, define use cases, map them to the product, and drive successful go-lives.

  • Build to release in minutes. Use AI-assisted development to write production code, integrations and configuration faster than the standard engineering loop allows.

  • Be the technical point of contact for customers across the relationship.

  • Drive adoption after launch: unblock teams, navigate issues, and find new areas where Athena can add value.

  • Help customers and internal stakeholders understand how to get real leverage from Athena, which means understanding the model behaviour, prompt patterns, and agent configurations.

  • Bring the field back to the roadmap: work with our engineering leads, product designers and CTO to shape what we build around real customer needs.

  • Be the technical authority in the sales process: frame the opportunity with prospects and own the hard questions.

What you'll own from day one

  • Real customers and real rollouts, not a backlog handed down from someone else

  • The judgement calls on how Athena gets deployed and adopted inside complex organisations

  • A direct line into the roadmap, because you see what customers actually need before anyone else does

What we're looking for

This role suits someone who is energised by ambiguity, likes owning outcomes in front of customers rather than behind them, and does their best work when the pace is high.

  • Multiple years of industry experience in a full stack web app development role (ideally in SaaS), with the ability to ship production code.

  • Great knowledge of TypeScript and an appreciation for the language.

  • Experienced in customer-facing: you can run a room that spans HR operations through to senior leadership, and earn technical credibility quickly.

  • A track record of turning ambiguous business requirements into working solutions.

  • Experience with enterprise integration work (APIs, SSO, and HRIS systems such as Workday are a strong plus).

  • Has worked directly with LLMs or agentic systems, prompt engineering, tool-calling, evaluation, or agent orchestration, can speak to where the model behaved unexpectedly and what you did about it.

  • Has operated in a product or technical domain that didn't have a settled playbook and comfortable being the one writing it.

  • A bias for ownership and speed, and the judgement to know what to build now versus later

  • Willingness to travel for onsite client work.

This is an in-person role. Our team comes together in the office Monday through Thursday, while most of the team collaborates in person on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

Package & Benefits

Early stage startups can be messy – we know that. We're putting effort in providing you with the best employee experience and a quality driven environment in exchange for trusting us.

  • Market-leading compensation that reflects your value

  • 25 days paid time off each year plus public holidays

  • Share Options with 5-year exercise window so you don’t feel pressure to exercise if you leave

  • Free Thursday lunches at HQ, quarterly team events, and company offsites.

  • Top tier private coverage for health, vision and dental care

  • A new MacBook and tools you need to do your best work

  • Enhanced parental leave with up to 16 weeks for primary and 4 weeks for secondary

  • Learning & development budget

Why Join Humaans Today?

HR tech is having its AI moment and we’re positioned to own it. Humaans started as a next-gen HRIS taking on large incumbents in a massive market. We’ve since evolved into something even bigger: an AI platform that sits across workforce data and automates the operational layer of HR entirely; the natural progression of what we’ve been building toward.

The product is highly differentiated. It’s built around a structured workforce data model that makes AI reliable in an HR context, something no one else has gotten right. Customers notice the difference immediately.

We’re backed by Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, and operators who’ve built some of the most consequential software companies of the last decade: the founders of Slack, Figma, and Shopify, and Asana’s former CRO and Head of OpenAI International.

We’re a small team with an unapologetically high bar. It shows up in the product, in how we communicate, and in the standards we hold each other to.

Our Commitment to Diversity

At Humaans we’re looking for genuinely good people that are transparent and emphatic. We’re committed to providing equal opportunities, a diverse and inclusive work environment, and ensuring a fair interview process for everyone. You’re welcome to apply no matter your gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

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