Operon
Agentic data layer for manufacturing & process industries.
Founding FDE
About the role
Founding Forward Deployment Engineer
Operon is building the context layer for AI agents in industrial enterprise, the infrastructure that lets AI actually understand what's happening on a job site, in a facility, or across a fleet of equipment. We're four months old, YC-backed, and we're deploying our first product in the Process and Manufacturing Industry. This is not a polish-and-ship role. You'll be on the ground with customers, figuring out how our software fits into messy real-world workflows, and feeding that directly back into what we build.
What you’ll have
- Full ownership of projects.
- You will define what “Forward Deployed Engineering” means at Operon.
What You’ll Do
- Embed with customers to understand engineering workflows at the source.
- Ship production code across backend, frontend, data pipelines, and AI workflows.
- Translate ambiguous customer pain into durable product abstractions.
- Debug failures in real environments.
- Work directly with the founder on product, architecture, customer deployment, and technical strategy.
About Operon
Operon is building the data intelligence layer for heavy industry.
The world's refineries, chemical plants, and power facilities run on engineering documents — P&IDs, schematics, datasheets, and decades of scanned drawings. A single plant holds tens of thousands of them, and today only senior engineers can read them. That knowledge is trapped in PDFs, and the engineers who understand it are retiring.
We turn those documents into a live, queryable model of the plant. An engineer can ask questions in plain language, trace how a system actually connects, and build agentic workflows — safety reviews, compliance, revamp and design engineering — on top of the most critical data in one of the most underserved industries on earth.
We're a small, deeply technical team that ships fast and works directly with heavy industries, specifically owner-operators, and EPCs in oil & gas, chemicals, power and heavy asset manufacturing. We deploy into real plants via FDE model.
