I'm Doug Kinnison. Hand me a fuzzy, high-stakes customer problem and I turn it into working AI software in your stack — fast. Agentic systems (autonomous agents, the harnesses and loops that run them, the evals that keep them honest), full-stack delivery, and the customer conversations that make it actually land. Twenty-five years shipping product, from the design file to the deploy.
AI-lab & startup FDE / solutions-engineering roles · in person across the US, or remote
A forward deployed engineer has to do three jobs at once: understand the customer, build the thing, and make it stick. I've spent 25 years doing all three.
Autonomous agents and the harnesses and loops that run them — with the evals and guardrails that keep them honest. Multi-step Claude pipelines, tool use, and retrieval, running in production against real latency and cost limits — not a demo in a notebook.
I sit with the customer, find where the real value is, and translate it into scope. I talk to engineers, designers, and leadership in each one's own language — because I've held all three seats.
Fuzzy problem in, working software out — on a two-week clock, not a six-month roadmap. I scope tight, build in the open, and ship something real every few days.
Frontend, backend, serverless, database, auth, payments, DNS, deploy. I can own a customer solution from blank repo to live URL without waiting on anyone.
People don't use what they don't understand. I make the surface clear and the onboarding obvious, so adoption actually happens after the demo ends.
As a founder I've answered for the P&L, not just the ticket. I care whether the thing works in the wild and moves a number — which is the only reason an FDE is in the room.
An end-to-end AI product I designed, built, deployed, and sell. A Claude-powered pipeline that audits how AI assistants recommend local businesses, delivered as an encrypted, paywalled report with a Stripe checkout and a lightweight CRM. Read the technical case study →
Founded Pelagora, an open-source peer-to-peer commerce protocol, and built Reffo on top of it — an AI-first marketplace whose autonomous agent lists, negotiates, and closes deals. Architecture to launch.
Design and engineering across products in film, games, and software — a private client roster I deliver for directly, hands on the keyboard.
Most people selling AI have only ever sold. I've drawn the design file, written the code, and answered for the P&L — so I can walk into a customer's world, understand it fast, and build the thing that fits it. Twenty-five years across film, games, and product taught me the one rule that matters here: people don't use what they don't understand. So I build things people use. That's the job of a Forward Deployed Engineer, and it's the work I want to do next.
Doug Kinnison
If you're at an AI lab or a startup and you need someone who can sit with customers and ship, I'd love to talk. Quickest way to reach me is email — I reply the same day.
In person across the US, or remote · 347.712.1381