Forward Deployed Strategist
US$180,000 – US$250,000 / yr base salary
Posted 9 Sep 2026
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$180,000 – US$250,000 / yr |
|---|
About Chalk
Chalk is building the data platform that powers the future of machine learning applications. We tear down complexity, latency, and scale barriers that have traditionally constrained ML capabilities. Our platform combines Rust-speed performance with elegant tools that developers love to use. Leading companies depend on Chalk for everything from stopping fraudulent credit card swipes, verifying identities, and maximizing clean energy capture. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A, led by Felicis.
About the role
Chalk is the AI data platform built for inference. Customers come to us for two halves of the same problem: the context their models and agents run on, and the runtime they run in. Both sit inside the customer's own cloud.
Forward Deployed Strategists owns the technical direction of Chalk’s integrations: what gets built, in what order, and whether it holds up. You sit alongside sales, delivery, account management, and support on your accounts, and you’re the technical judge across all of it.
You’ll work closely with FDEs, who build directly with customer engineering teams. Some of that work is model-driven: fraud, payments, underwriting, recommendations, pricing. Increasingly it is agentic. Investigation agents that sit alongside data scientists, workflow automation, trust and safety, customer support, all of it running against real production context inside the customer's own environment.
Most problems start with the customer's architecture rather than ours. You will be asked to weigh in on systems Chalk does not touch. The bar for this role is architectural depth and judgment.
What you will do
-
Run technical discovery: get inside how a customer's systems work, what is breaking, and what they are trying to ship
-
Advise on their architecture and their plans, including the migration path off whatever they run today. Tell them plainly what will break, what to sequence first, and what is not worth doing
-
Design what they build on Chalk, and set the bar it has to clear on correctness, latency, and cost
-
Design agentic solutions on Chalk: what an agent is allowed to reach, how it gets evaluated against real production context before it ships, and how it runs safely inside the customer's own cloud
-
Design, scope, and execute tight POCs. Pick the one thing worth proving, define what a clean result looks like before anyone starts, and keep the scope from drifting