Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

**Fence** Senior Forward Deployed Engineer; EUR 60-80k (flexible for right candidates) + up to 30% bonus + stock options; Madrid preferred, open to Europe and US East Coast (Hybrid)

**About Company** We are a team of business-driven builders with prior experience in building tech (on-chain and off-chain), on a mission to construct internet-native debt capital markets. To put it in simple terms, we are making debt global, efficient, and programmable. As the first step towards our vision, we are developing a debt facility management platform that automates asset-backed debt facility operations. Our product is already live with clients such as Payflow's €20 million debt facility with BBVA, as well as other fintech platforms in the BNPL, trade finance, real estate, ISAs, and consumer loan segments. Roughly thirty debt facilities have gone live on the platform to date. From a tech perspective, we digitise credit agreements, integrate dynamic data sources, and design pioneering Automated Bank Accounts. We leverage blockchain smart contracts in our backend to automate capital and asset flows according to legal documentation. So far, we've slashed operational costs by 80% and reduced cost of debt by up to 30%. Backed by some of Europe's premier VCs and business angels.

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**About the Role** Fence is building a new Forward Deployed Engineering team — turning a signed debt facility into a running production deal is now the constraint on how fast Fence can take on new business. Today that onboarding work is done by platform engineers between other commitments; every new facility slows platform work down and vice versa. This role owns the path from signed facility to a deal running in production, per deal, end to end: Operations reads the credit agreement and writes the functional definition; you turn it into working software — design it, build it, prove it, ship it into the production codebase — then stay with it until it runs without you. Six months after go-live, the measure is simple: the deal generates no engineering tickets. You'll own client meetings on your deals with an advisory posture — telling clients how it should work on the platform, and saying no with a reason when what they ask for won't hold. This is Fence's highest-priority hiring push: a parallel team alongside the 9-person Product Engineering team.

**Responsibilities** - Own the onboarding pipeline end to end for your deals: database structures, deal schemas, declaration services, metrics, covenants, dashboards, automated reports, and (where Fence controls cash) on-chain transaction builders and waterfall configuration. - Turn the deal's functional definition into live calculation, verification and control: eligibility rules, borrowing base, covenants, cash controls, reporting calendars. - Interrogate specs before building: find the questions the functional spec hasn't answered and send them back to Operations — never quietly build something "reasonable" when the rule was never settled. - Own client data intake and prove it's right: profile what the client actually sends, build the ingestion, and reconcile what the client declared vs what Fence stored vs what expected payments imply. - Run client meetings on your deals: working sessions with their operations and credit people, technical sessions with their engineers, and follow-ups that turn conversations into decisions. - Hand deals to Operations at go-live with runbooks and invariant checks so Ops resolves day-to-day without you. - Spot patterns that recur across deals and hand them to Product Engineering with context — without over-building while a client waits.

**Required Skills** A. 5+ years of software engineering with real programming depth and the habit of keeping business logic separate from I/O — able to explain why the layers exist (Fence uses hexagonal architecture), not just follow them. B. Production-grade Python backend skills: FastAPI, Pydantic, PostgreSQL, and AWS. C. A track record of owning delivery end to end: refined the requirements yourself, designed it, shipped it, proved it, handed it over. D. Direct client exposure: has run technical sessions with a customer's own team, not been the engineer briefed afterwards. Can tell the story of changing a client's mind — telling a customer no and keeping the relationship. E. Fluency with real-world data: SQL, spreadsheets that were never meant to be parsed, PDFs, reconciliations that do not balance. F. Integration experience: reading someone else's API docs, debugging their payloads, building file pipelines for a client who cannot change their export. G. Practical AI-assisted development: judgment about where coding agents get it wrong, not just enthusiasm. H. English strong enough to be the technical voice with a client, both async and in the room.

**Bonus Skills** - Comfort with financial complexity: lending, payments, private credit, treasury, accounting, insurance — anywhere precise rules govern money and getting a definition wrong has consequences.

**Logistical Info** - **Location:** Madrid preferred, open to Europe and US East Coast; hybrid preferred; no client-site travel currently, but candidates should be open to it (Fence has US clients) - **Compensation:** EUR 60-80k (flexible for right candidates) + up to 30% bonus + stock options - **Other:** New Forward Deployed Engineering team built alongside the 9-person Product Engineering team; async-first, written-first engineering culture; small, high-precision team working across product, finance, operations and customers

**Ideal Background** - Senior backend-leaning engineers who have worked directly with clients. Client calibration (Sep 15): Palantir-style forward deployed engineers, or consultants who ship production code — not solutions consultants who script around problems. - Hiring cadence: The client wants 4 FDEs by December 2026 and ideally 6 by Q1 2027, but there is no fixed quota — his words: "just send good candidates; if we get only 2 it's still better than 0." Quality over volume. - Comp: client confirmed (Sep 15) same band as Fence's other engineering roles for now (60-80k base); Fence asks that candidates be genuinely comfortable with ~100-130k EUR total comp (incl. bonus + equity) framing; open to negotiating for truly exceptional profiles. - Interview process confirmed (Sep 15): similar loop to Fence's other engineering roles, with one session including a member of the Ops team, and an FDE-specific take-home.

**Green Flags** - Has told a customer no, with a reason, and kept the relationship — changed a client's mind by being right and showing their work. - Turns ambiguity into operating structure without losing speed: sends under-specified specs back with questions instead of building on assumptions. - Comfortable shipping deliberately un-generalised, deal-scoped code at production quality — and handing recurring patterns to the platform team rather than over-building. - High-agency, low-ego; thrives in async-first, written-first environments.

**Red Flags** - Order-takers: builds exactly what the client asked for even when it will not hold; wants a spec they can build from without questioning it. - Solutions consultants who script around problems rather than shipping into a production codebase at platform standards. - Sees client work as a stepping stone to platform work — onboardings are the product here, not a tax on it. - Wants to run the account or hide behind an account manager: Ops owns the relationship; this role is the technical counterpart in the room. - Over-builders who generalise the first implementation while a client waits. - Treats "it works, trust me" as evidence. - Not open to client-site travel if it becomes needed.

**Interview Process** 1. 30-45 mins: 2x Culture & Fit interview with 1 engineer each (2 engineers in total) 2. Take home exercise (2-4 hours max; FDE-specific version) 3. 2x Tech interview with 2 interviewers each — one session includes a member of the Ops team