Square Waves Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Remote · Contractor

Apply for Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Square Waves is a digital agency and embedded operations firm based in the Chicago area, with offices in St. Charles and Fulton Market. We work with mid-market B2B companies (manufacturers, industrial firms, commercial real estate, and the businesses that keep the economy running) on their websites, systems, automation, and AI infrastructure. What makes us different is how we work. Most agencies ship a deliverable and leave. We embed in our clients' operations, learn how their business actually runs, and build things that hold up after we step back. That ranges from Webflow sites and search strategy to CRM automation, custom internal tools, and AI powered workflows. Our clients treat us less like a vendor and more like the technical arm of their company. We're a team of ~20 people who care about root causes over quick fixes, owned infrastructure over duct taped integrations, and doing the simple thing well before doing the complex thing at all. If you like solving real problems for real businesses and seeing your work actually get used, you'll fit in here.

Hybrid - St. Charles, IL & Fulton Market, Chicago

The role

You're the technical person in the room with the client — and the one who builds the thing after the call ends. You'll join discovery calls, understand a client's actual problem (not just what they asked for), sketch 2–3 viable approaches, scope and price the work, then deliver it. You own solutions end-to-end: from "here's what's possible" to "here's the thing, working, in production."

This is not a presales role where you hand off to a delivery team. This is not a heads-down dev role where requirements arrive fully formed. It's both halves in one seat.

What you'll do

• Sit in on client calls and translate business problems into technical options with real tradeoffs (speed vs. cost vs. complexity)
• Scope, roadmap, and price solutions — you'll draft the SOW, not just estimate hours for someone else's
• Build what you scoped: full-stack applications, automations, integrations, internal tools, AI workflows
• Deploy and maintain what you ship — you own it through production, not just through demo
• Feed what you learn in the field back into our productized offerings

Technical profile

• Full-stack: comfortable across frontend (React/Next.js), backend (Node/APIs), and databases (Postgres/Supabase — schema design, not just queries)
• AI-native development: you use tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor as force multipliers — and you know their limits. You can direct agents to do real work, review what they produce critically, and ship code you understand and stand behind
• Modern deployment: Vercel, serverless, CI/CD — you ship fast without shipping fragile
• Integration fluency: REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, and gluing together the tools our clients actually run (HubSpot, QuickBooks, Webflow, Zapier/Make)
• AI implementation: building LLM-powered workflows and agents for clients — prompt design, RAG, MCP, evals — not just using AI to code

What we're looking for

• Client-facing confidence: you can explain a technical decision to a non-technical owner and hold the room
• Judgment on scope — knowing when the simple version is the right version
• Comfort with ambiguity; you'll often be defining the problem, not just solving it
• A builder's pace with an engineer's standards — AI tooling makes you faster, not sloppier
• Bonus: agency or consulting background

How you'll know you're doing it well

Clients trust your recommendations, projects come in close to what you scoped, and the things you build keep working after you move on.