Forward Deployed Engineer-AI

Location: Bengaluru, India

About Whatfix
Who are we?
Founded in 2014 by Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar, Whatfix is a leading global B2B SaaS provider and the largest pure-play enterprise digital adoption platform (DAP). Whatfix empowers companies to maximize the ROI of their digital investments across the application lifecycle, from ideation to training to the deployment of software. Driving user productivity, ensuring process compliance, and improving user experience of internal and customer-facing applications.
Spearheading the category with serial innovation and unmatched customer-centricity, Whatfix is the only DAP innovating beyond the category, positioning itself as a comprehensive suite for GenAI-powered digital adoption, analytics, and application simulation. Whatfix product suite consists of 3 products - DAP, Product Analytics, and Mirror. This product suite helps businesses accelerate ROI on digital investments by streamlining application deployment across its lifecycle.
Whatfix has seven offices across the US, India, UK, Germany, Singapore, and Australia and a presence across 40+ countries.
Customers: 700+ enterprise customers, including over 80 Fortune 500 companies such as Shell, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions.
Investors: Raised a total of ~$270 million. Most recently Series E round of $125 Million led by Warburg Pincus with participation from existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Other investors include Cisco Investments, Eight Roads Ventures (A division of Fidelity Investments), Dragoneer Investments, Peak XV Partners, and Stellaris Venture Partners.

With over 45% YoY sustainable annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth, Whatfix is among the “Top 50 Indian Software Companies” as per G2 Best Software Awards.

Recognized as a “Leader” in the digital adoption platforms (DAP) category for the past 4+ years by leading analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Everest Group.

Only DAP to be among the top 35% companies worldwide in sustainability excellence with EcoVadis Bronze Medal

On the G2 peer review platform, Whatfix has received 77 Leader badges across all market segments, including Small, Medium, and Enterprise, in 2024, among numerous other industry recognitions.

About the Team — BizApps Agentification
The BizApps Agentification team sits at the intersection of AI, business operations, and product engineering. We are replacing manual, repetitive business workflows — recruitment screening, lead enrichment, AR collections, pre-sales automation, and more — with AI agents that think, decide, and act. This is not incremental automation; it's a ground-up rethinking of how internal functions (Sales, HR, Finance, RevOps) operate using agentic AI.
BizApps is organized into small, domain-aligned pods: one FDE Lead and three FDEs, each pod owning a single business domain end to end. A Business Champion from the domain team works alongside the pod and owns adoption and ROI; the pod owns discovery, design, build, and operation of every agent it ships.
Role Overview
We are hiring an FDE to own the agentification roadmap for a business domain and build the team that delivers it. This role collapses what would traditionally be a Product Manager, a Designer, and a Staff/Principal Engineer into one person, and adds team leadership on top. You will remain the strongest technical and architectural mind on your pod while being accountable for domain-level business outcomes — not just what your team ships, but the hours saved, error reduction, and adoption those agents drive.
What You'll Do
Key Responsibilities:
You build the system that makes delegating work to coding agents reliable, and that system starts with specs.

Spec-driven development is the standard, not the exception. No meaningful change begins with code or a prompt. It begins with a written spec covering the problem, the expected outcome, the constraints, and testable acceptance criteria. The spec is the source of truth, and agents implement against it.

Specs live in the repo. Specs are versioned, reviewed, and maintained alongside the code they describe. You keep them current, and when behavior changes, the spec changes first.

Context and guardrails that make specs actionable. You maintain repository context and instruction files, shared spec templates and prompts, and the tooling and review workflows that let engineers hand substantial work to coding agents with confidence.

A Definition of Done that holds up with agents in the loop. An approved spec in the repo, executable tests written before delegation, human review of all agent-generated code against the spec, and context files kept up to date.

You verify against the spec, not just generate. You write executable specs and critically review what comes back. Nothing ships because it compiles or passes its own generated tests; it ships because it demonstrably meets the acceptance criteria in the spec.

Clear accountability. You own what you merge, whether a person or an agent wrote it, and you can trace every change back to the spec that justified it.

Safe use of AI. Approved tools only, with sensitive data and credentials kept out of prompts and agent context.

Own Discovery for Your Domain

Own the domain roadmap — sequence the entire agentification program for your function by ROI and dependency, not just the next workflow.

Run quarterly planning with the department head and Business Champion.

Define what the function looks like when it's 80% agentic, and work backward from that endgame.

Set Architecture Standards

Hold architecture authority for the domain — review every agent design before build begins.

Make the hardest cross-workflow design calls: agent topology, escalation logic, data flows, feedback loops.

Design the domain's agent ecosystem, not just individual agents, and set the patterns your FDEs follow.

Stay Hands-On Where It Matters Most

Take the hardest unsolved technical problem on the team and pair with an FDE to crack it — you are not the highest-volume coder, but the deepest technical thinker on the pod.

Set the non-negotiable quality bar: production-readiness, observability, and feedback loops on every agent shipped.

Own Business Outcomes

Be accountable for domain-level metrics: total hours automated, error reduction, business team satisfaction, and adoption rate.

Report to BizApps leadership — and, on major initiatives, the board — on agentification progress.

Own the business case for next quarter's roadmap.

Build the Platform

Champion platform extraction after every workflow delivery and run the platform retro cadence for your pod.

Represent your domain in bi-weekly cross-pod platform roadmap reviews.

Decide what gets generalized into the shared platform versus what stays domain-specific.

Build the Team

Build FDE capability — specifically the discovery/PM muscle most engineers lack. Coach at least 2 FDE-1s to FDE-2 through structured, hands-on development.

Run design reviews and make staffing calls — which FDE works on which workflow.

Create an environment where your team becomes self-sufficient: your ultimate output is a pod that doesn't need you in the room to ship well.

Must-Haves

3 to 7 yrs years of experience with demonstrated multiplier orientation — you've made others around you measurably better, not just shipped your own work.

Real experience with Spec Driven development and coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot on meaningful work. You've delegated substantial work, seen where agents go wrong, and changed how you scope and verify as a result.

Hands-on experience building AI features: LLM APIs, prompt and context design, retrieval, agents and tool use, and evaluation. You understand the cost, latency and failure modes of probabilistic systems.

A track record of running discovery independently: sitting with a business team, mapping their process, scoping the automation target, and defining success metrics without a PM handing you a spec.

Architecture-level ownership of at least one production system — you can design agent topology, tool-calling chains, human escalation points, and feedback loops, and defend the tradeoffs.

Strong Python fundamentals and hands-on experience integrating LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Gemini, or similar) into production systems — you can still pair on the hardest bug in the codebase.

Experience leading or informally mentoring engineers — you can point to specific people whose scope grew because of you.

Comfort operating as the business-facing owner of outcomes: defining metrics, diagnosing whether underperformance is a design, data, or adoption problem, and acting on it.

Good to Have

Experience with agentic frameworks — LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, or equivalent — and RAG pipeline design.

Familiarity with enterprise systems integration (Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar CRM/ERP platforms).

Experience presenting technical roadmaps to non-technical executive stakeholders (CRO, CFO, department heads).

A background that spans at least two of Discovery, Workflow Architecture, and Build & Ship at a senior level — this role does not suit engineers who have only ever received a defined spec.

Why This Role
This is not a management role bolted onto engineering seniority as a consolation prize — it's a genuinely player-coach position where you retain architecture authority and hands-on credibility while building a team and owning a P&L-adjacent outcome. BizApps Agentification is a strategic priority for Whatfix, with a direct line to company leadership, real users, and real production outcomes. If you want to run a business domain's transformation to agentic AI — end to end, from roadmap to running team — this is that role.

We strive to live and breathe our Cultural Principles and encourage employees to demonstrate some of these core values - Customer First; Empathy; Transparency; Fail Fast and scale Fast; No Hierarchies for Communication; Deep Dive and innovate; Trust, Do it as you own it;
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diverse people because of and not in spite of the differences. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status
At Whatfix, we deeply value collaboration, innovation, and human connection. We believe that being together in the office fosters open communication, strengthens our sense of community, and accelerates innovation - ultimately helping us achieve our goals more effectively.
At the same time, we understand the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance and providing flexibility to our employees. As part of our hybrid work culture, all Wednesdays are designated as work-from-home days, allowing employees to maintain flexibility while staying connected. We’re open to considering exceptions on a case-by-case basis to ensure you’re supported in managing both work and personal life seamlessly.
Whatfix uses AI-assisted screening and evaluation across open positions to support a structured, consistent, and fair hiring process. AI is currently used for resume screening across all roles. For some roles, shortlisted candidates have an initial exploratory discussion with an AI interviewer, which shares a summary and score with our hiring team. These insights are advisory only, and all hiring decisions are made by Whatfix’s internal hiring teams.