Forward Deployed Sustainability Engineer, Sustainability AI

About Watershed

Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. We are looking for team members who love product-building, want to work hard at a mission-oriented startup, and will collaborate with us in shaping the culture of a growing team.

We have offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City, and remote team members across the US and Europe. We hope that you'll be interested in joining us!

The role

Forward Deployed Sustainability Engineers (FDSEs) are a new kind of role at Watershed: part technical builder, part trusted customer partner, part product iterator. You'll sit at the intersection of our product engineering teams and our customers, doing the hands-on, creative work of figuring out how Watershed's newest AI products deliver outcomes for sustainability teams in the real world.

This is a deliberately experimental role. We're building a small incubation team that embeds directly within our product and engineering teams and works closely alongside our customers on our new AI products. You'll co-develop AI skills, build prototypes, agents and workflows, and bring back fast, high-quality feedback to shape how our products evolve.

Concretely, you'll focus on one of Watershed's flagship AI products for the core measure, report, and act loop. You’ll work closely with our largest, most strategic customers to drive real scope 3 decarbonization by using Product Footprints.

What You'll Do

• Embed directly with product and engineering teams and customers to drive adoption and success through beta, and GA stages

• Co-develop agent skills, prompts, and workflows that unlock new use cases and help customers bring more of their sustainability work into Watershed

• Build AI-assisted scripts and prototypes that solve novel sustainability problems and demonstrate their value for customers

• Work directly alongside our account teams and our customers: joining calls, embedding in their workflows, running experiments, and building trust as a partner

• Close the feedback loop between customers and product by identifying what's working, what isn't, and what to build next

• Partner with Customer Org leaders to package use cases, learnings, and playbooks so that what works in the field can scale across customer-facing teams

What We're Looking For

You don't need to be a perfect fit across every dimension, but you should have strong demonstrated aptitude or hands-on experience in most of these areas:

Technical:

• You've built things: scripts, prototypes, data pipelines, or AI-assisted workflows. You're comfortable writing prototype quality code and aren't afraid to move fast.

• Experience with AI tooling, including building skills, building products with LLMs, or prototyping agent workflows

• Fluent with data tools (Excel, SQL, Python): wrangling messy data, building lightweight pipelines, turning raw inputs into usable outputs

Sustainability:

• You understand corporate sustainability: scope 1/2/3 emissions, product footprints, supply chain decarbonization, or related domains

Customer-facing:

• You've worked directly with customers or technical stakeholders to build trust and solve complex problems

• You can tell a compelling story with data, from raw numbers to insight to recommendation

Prior Experience:

• Minimum of 6 years in a sustainability, technical or customer-facing role, ideally all 3

• You're energized by ambiguity and fast iteration. This is an incubation team and things will change.

• You connect the dots between technical possibilities and real-world impact

Must be willing to work from an office 4 days per week (except for remote roles)

Watershed has hub offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and Mexico City and satellite offices in Denver, Sydney, Paris, and Berlin. Where we have offices, employees are expected to be in office for 4 days per week. Certain jobs are open to being remote and will be specifically noted on the jobs page and in the job description if so.

What’s the interview process like?

It starts the same for every candidate: getting to know the team members through 1 to 2 conversations about Watershed, your experience, and your interests. Next steps can vary by role, but usual next steps are a skill or experience interview (e.g. a coding interview for an engineer, a portfolio review for a designer, deeper experience call for other roles) which leads to a virtual or in person interview panel. We prioritize transparency and lack of surprise throughout the process.

What if I need accommodations for my interview?

At Watershed, we are dedicated to ensuring an inclusive recruitment process. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities, long-term conditions, mental health needs, religious observances, neurodivergence, or pregnancy-related support requirements. If you need assistance during your process, please contact your recruiter.