Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

About Collate
 
Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.
 
Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.
 
We’re an elite team, with $125M in funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, CRV, Conviction, Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join an early-stage company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.
 
 
About the Role
Collate’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with Fortune 100 life sciences organizations to deploy production AI systems across their most critical document and regulatory workflows. We operate at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development — using early engagements to define repeatable solution patterns, evaluation standards, and agentic architectures that scale across the industry.
You’ll join as one of the first members of this team and operate with the autonomy of a founder. Your job is to go deep on the hardest problems at our most strategic customers — medical writers, regulatory affairs teams, clinical operations, and development engineers — identify what’s structurally broken, and build production AI systems that solve it. What you build shapes the Collate platform for every customer that comes after you.
 
Modern Tech Stack
 
Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, Postgres as our main database, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services.
 
Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Other key systems include S3, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.