Forward Deployed Engineer

About HalyardHalyard Collective is a private equity firm built on a simple observation: AI is transforming white-collar work, and the greatest value will accrue to the services firms being transformed, not the companies selling the software. So we own those companies. We acquire high-quality businesses in fragmented, lower-middle-market services industries and transform how their work gets done — as principals, not vendors.We believe the next generation of private equity will be defined by firms that pair disciplined, fundamentals-first investing with a proprietary operating system they build themselves — and we intend to set that standard. Rather than bolting point solutions onto a portfolio from the outside, we build at the bare metal, next to the people who do the work — shipping complete systems of work that augment those people rather than replace them. Our founding team spans both halves of that equation: managing partners who invested at KKR, Sequoia, and Bain Capital, alongside a Director of Engineering who spent 15 years at Google building the platforms behind some of its largest products and led a 130-engineer organization before joining Halyard.The OpportunityHalyard is for builders who want to set the standard for transforming work with AI. We don’t ship generic point solutions — we architect complete systems of work spanning technology, people, and process. And unlike a startup’s single bet, your equity upside is tied to a diversified portfolio of companies: the risk/reward profile of an index with the impact of building from zero.The Forward Deployed Engineer works inside Halyard’s build engine — the machine that turns the messy, manual workflows inside our portfolio companies into production software. This is an early-career role with an outsized mandate: today the founders and our Director of Engineering build this tooling directly, and you will work shoulder-to-shoulder with them from day one — apprenticed to an engineer who spent 15 years building platforms at Google, while owning real builds end-to-end on a modern, AI-native stack — embedding inside portfolio companies, sitting with the people doing the work, finding the workflows that eat hours, and shipping software that removes them. As the portfolio grows, so does your ownership — of the platform, the playbook, and eventually the engineers who join behind you.What You’ll OwnEmbedded Discovery & ScopingGo onsite at portfolio companies and work alongside office leaders, property managers, leasing agents, and accounting staff to understand how the work actually happens — not how the org chart says it does.Translate ambiguous operational pain (“month-end close takes a week,” “we can’t see vacancy across offices”) into clearly scoped builds with measurable outcomes.Prioritize ruthlessly: the portfolio generates more ideas than anyone can ship, and your judgment about what to build first is the difference-maker.Build & ShipDesign, build, and own production software end-to-end: data pipelines, internal tools, integrations, and LLM-powered workflows — from first commit to daily use by real operators.Move with speed and momentum: working prototypes in days, production in weeks. Operators can feel the difference between a builder who ships and one who plans, and that trust compounds.Hold a high engineering bar in the field — version control, testing, monitoring, and documentation — because these systems run real businesses and real money.Put frontier AI to work where it earns its place: agentic workflows, document extraction, classification, and automation across leasing, maintenance, accounting, and owner communication.Data & IntegrationsWork across the portfolio’s data layer: integrate property-management systems (AppFolio, Propertyware, Buildium, and whatever the next acquisition runs on), accounting systems, and CRMs into a clean, extensible data model.Build and maintain the automated reporting that the founders, boards, and office leaders run on — unit counts, vacancy, revenue, resident-benefit-package penetration, and the KPIs that drive EBITDA.Treat messy data as the job, not an obstacle: reconciling exports, catching bad inputs, and making numbers people can trust.Platform & PlaybookExtend Halyard’s proprietary platform — the internal CRM, target discovery and enrichment tooling, automated qualification, and diligence data-room tooling that power the M&A engine.Help build the repeatable integration playbook — data migration, systems cutover, reporting onboarding — that gets faster with every acquisition and can be replicated across new markets and future platforms.Feed what you learn in the field back into the platform so every deployment makes the next one easier.Diligence & IntegrationSupport technical diligence on acquisition targets: assess systems, data quality, and integration risk, and help give the founding and investment team a clear, decision-ready view ahead of close.Drive the technology workstream of post-close integration — sequenced, low-disruption migration onto Halyard’s stack that preserves the local relationships that make each business valuable.Qualifications0–2 years shipping production software — through full-time work, internships, or serious projects people actually use — with a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a comparable technical field, or a portfolio that makes the degree irrelevant.Full-stack fluency: Python and/or TypeScript, SQL, cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS), and comfort building and consuming APIs. You can stand up a data pipeline, a backend service, and a usable internal UI without waiting on anyone.Hands-on experience building with LLMs — agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction — and a clear-eyed view of where they work and where they don’t. AI-native by default: you reach for modern AI tooling first and know how to critically review what it produces.Comfortable with messy, real-world data: system exports, spreadsheets, PDFs, and the accounting quirks of small businesses.Startup-CTO mindset in an early-career package: energized by owning problems end-to-end with minimal supervision, not running a process someone else designed.Strong communication with non-technical operators — the EQ to earn the trust of a 20-year property manager and the clarity to explain what you built and why it matters.Bias to action and speed: the kind of person who ships the fix the same day and follows up to make sure it actually got used.Based in San Francisco, or able to travel frequently to San Francisco to work in person with the team; willingness to travel regularly to portfolio company offices.Competitive drive and a track record of performing under pressure — collegiate athletics or a similar background a plus.Bachelor’s degree required.Additional InformationBase salary range: $125,000–$175,000, depending on experience, plus a performance bonus tied to clear delivery and adoption milestones — systems shipped, portfolio companies integrated, measurable EBITDA impact — not a black box.Long-term equity incentive in Halyard and/or its platforms.Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance.