Forward Deployment Engineer

Embed with our enterprise customers and shape what we build next

We’re looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) who thrives at the intersection of customer reality, AI product development, and engineering.

This isn’t a customer success role, you’ll be embedded with Europe’s most ambitious companies, building the workflows, integrations, and prototypes that make Cernel deliver value in their actual stack and feeding everything you learn back into our roadmap.

You will embed yourselves into the workflows of customers, being onsite for extended period to understand the need of users before they do themselves. You will work on real implementation challenges, building embedded into businesses and guiding them to become AI-native in their work.

Your deep technical understanding of our product alongside hands-on experience with customers makes you the best candidate for evolving our products. This is a role for someone who takes ownership, moves with urgency, and wants to be the engineer who decides where the products go.

Join us on our growth journey

At Cernel, we’re bringing the AI revolution to ecommerce by building the intelligent backbone behind every item sold online. We make ecommerce teams work smarter, faster, and with amplified abilities across the entire value chain - starting with what lies at the core: product data. We design and develop a platform in-house that provides our customers with advanced AI capabilities on top of their existing data, allowing them to operationalize tasks and gain transparent insights into how their data is stored, enriched, and analyzed. We facilitate data management and actionable insights at scale across all their systems.

As Forward-Deployed Engineer, you’ll be the first hire of a new function at Cernel. You’ll work closely with our CEO and CTO, owning the technical relationship with two to four enterprise accounts at any time and translating field signal directly into product direction.

Responsibilities and daily work

Customer embedding and implementation

• Embed with enterprise customers (engineering, merchandising, and ecommerce ops teams) to map their actual workflows and data realities

• Configure Cernel’s enrichment workflows, taxonomy mappings, and channel adapters against the customer’s specific stack

• Own customer outcomes from contract signature through a 60-day value realization

• Co-pitch enterprise deals with the commercial team when technical depth unblocks the conversation

Building with the platform

• Write code: feed adapters, custom evaluators, integration glue, prototype features customers need

• Decide, every time you ship something, whether it becomes a generalisable Cernel template (free, productized) or stays bespoke (paid services, monetized maintenance)

• Build and tune AI agent workflows on top of Cernel’s ~1,000 fashion templates and skill environment

• Instrument enrichment outcomes - visibility scoring, return rate impact, ad performance - to prove ROI for enterprise customers

Field signal and product feedback

• Bring structured insights back to product and engineering teams - what is missing, what is broken, what is worth building

• Identify patterns across customers that should generalize into platform features

• Partner with engineering on prioritization when customer reality and roadmap diverge

Technologies you’ll work with

Customer integration

• Shopify, PIM systems (Akeneo, inRiver), and feed tools (Channable, DataFeedWatch) • BigQuery and customer-side data warehouses

• API integration and OAuth flows

AI and enrichment

• LLM-driven enrichment pipelines and agent workflows • Eval design for AI quality and customer-specific tuning

• Cernel’s agent and skill framework, taxonomy intelligence layer, and template system

Backend context

• Golang and Python services (you don’t need to write production code, but you’ll prototype against and extend them)

• Temporal workflow orchestration

• Event-driven architecture, SQL and NoSQL databases

Who you are and requirements

You have:

• 5+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with at least 2 years in customer-facing technical roles (FDE, solutions engineer, technical product, or founder)

• Ability to work onsite in Aarhus, with regular travel to enterprise customers across the Nordics

• Strong full-stack engineering skills: TypeScript and/or Python, APIs, SQL, data pipelines

• Hands-on experience with LLM-based pipelines, evals, or agent architectures

• A product-builder’s instinct - you can tell when a customer request is a one-off and when it is hiding a real platform feature

• Comfort making independent decisions in front of customers - you own the outcome

• Background in commerce, retail, marketplaces, or feed and catalog systems - bonus, not required

• Founder or early-employee experience at a startup - bonus, not required

Who we are

Cernel is building the next generation of ecommerce infrastructure with AI-powered agents that automate complex tasks and connect workflows across systems. We are developing an advanced agent framework that analyses data, makes decisions, and drives performance - giving ecommerce teams better results, higher conversions, and more time for creative work. We are currently a team of 20 people working from our brand new HQ at Frederiksbjerg, Aarhus. We are ambitious, caring, and collaborative. We work hard, move fast, and genuinely care about building both a great product and a great organisation.

Next steps and how to apply The process for the role will look as follows:

• Apply and share information about yourself

• Complete personality assessment

• 60 minutes onsite interview w/ CEO and Chief of Staff

• 90 minutes technical and customer scenario walkthrough w/ CTO

• Meet the team and culture fit conversation

Start date: As soon as possible