Forward Deployed Engineer

Construction is one of the world's most important industries - and one of the most underserved by software. We're building the operating system that fixes that. Come help us let builders build.

• Melbourne, min 3 days/week in our Richmond office (Mon/Wed/Fri), plus time with customers on their sites and in their offices

• Full time

Why BuildPass?

Most of construction still runs on spreadsheets, PDFs and paper - pulling builders away from the work they do best. BuildPass is one platform for the whole business of building: estimating, finance, scheduling, safety and site management, from the first estimate to the final payment.

It's working. Today BuildPass powers:

• 1,000+ head contractors, 100,000+ subcontractors and 500,000+ field workers across Australia and now the US

• 3.2M+ site sign-ons, 1.5M+ forms, 140k+ drawings and defects logged on real jobs

• A fast-shipping AI toolkit - BuildPass Agent, MCP, workflow automation and phone calls - that works inside a builder's live data, not the open web

But the software is only part of the job. Our customers run complex businesses with years of operational history and systems that don't fit together neatly. They need someone who can sit with them, understand the real workflow, work out what should change, and help build and ship it on BuildPass.

The role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer - the technical partner who sits between our customers and our product. You embed with our customers and our Customer Success team, unpack what builders actually need, and go build the answer.

Some customer problems are a workflow conversation. Some are a config change, a data import, or a script that saves a site team ten hours a week. Some are an AI agent or automation built on top of BuildPass. And some are real product gaps that deserve to reach our product engineering team as a well-evidenced, well-scoped brief. Your job is to tell the difference, and to own the technical follow-through end to end.

You'll sit within our Customer Success team, work daily with Support, and stay tightly connected to our product engineering and AI teams. You'll spend most of your week close to customers - on calls, on sites, in their workflows - and the rest of it building.

The split is roughly half customer-facing delivery, half hands-on building - a direct expression of the BuildPass Method: see a problem, build something useful, learn from real use, keep improving it.

Read more: https://method.bpass.team/method

What you'll do

• Partner with CSMs on our largest accounts as their technical counterpart - join the calls, ask the second and third why, and turn vague asks into scoped, solvable problems

• Build solutions on and around BuildPass: configuration, integrations, data migrations, scripts and AI-powered workflows using BuildPass Agent, our MCP and our APIs

• Default to automation: take the technical weight off Customer Success and Support - implementation requests, imports, register setups, the manual work that today eats hours of human time

• Triage technical issues before they become escalations: fix what you can directly, and package what you can't with reproduction steps, context and evidence for product engineering

• Use AI to multiply the whole customer team - internal tools, automations and agents that handle the routine work so CSMs and support spend their time on relationships and judgment

• Spot the patterns across accounts and feed them back to product, so a fix for one customer becomes a feature for a thousand

• Measure what you ship: hours saved, adoption moved, escalations prevented, churn risks retired

You'll thrive here if

• You like people as much as you like building. Customer calls energise you. You'd rather sit with a site manager and watch them work than guess from a ticket.

• You unpack problems from first principles. When a customer asks for a feature, you dig until you find the workflow underneath, then solve that.

• You're AI-native. LLMs are part of how you work. You've built automations with them, tested their output, and know where they fall over.

• You're resourceful across the stack. An API call, a SQL query, a quick script, a prompt tune and a spreadsheet wrangle, all before lunch. Useful everywhere beats best-in-the-world anywhere.

• You prototype before you present. You'd rather show a rough working version today than a polished plan next month. A good decision made this week beats a perfect one in three.

• You own it end to end. You arrive with the problem, a proposed solution and a clear ask, then drive it to done. No two customer problems arrive the same shape, and you bring the structure.

• You have empathy for non-technical users. Our users are project and site managers on a phone, between tasks, with no patience for complexity.

What we'd love to see

• A track record of technical work with customers in the room - solutions or implementation engineering, technical support or success, consulting, or engineering where you kept pulling yourself onto customer calls

• Enough engineering to be dangerous: comfortable with scripts, APIs and data wrangling (TypeScript, Python or similar), and honest about where you'd lean on the product engineering team

• AI already woven into how you work - you use LLM tools daily and you've built things with them, whether that's automations, agents or internal tools

• Evidence of turning a messy human problem into a shipped solution - a story, a demo or a write-up is perfect

• A writing sample - a Notion doc, customer brief, postmortem or blog post is plenty

Nice to have

• Deep, hands-on AI experience: building agents, RAG, evals, MCP servers or prompt pipelines, and the judgment to know where AI improves a workflow and where it's theatre

• Construction experience: Time with a builder, subcontractor or construction tech company - you know what a SWMS is, why site diaries matter, and what a contracts administrator does all day

• Prior forward deployed, solutions or founding-team experience at a SaaS or AI company, especially as the first person in the seat

Probably not a fit if

• You want to code heads-down all day with minimal human contact, or you want the meetings without the building

• You need detailed specs before you can make progress

• You see support threads and implementation work as beneath the role - at BuildPass they're the richest source of truth

• You use AI occasionally but haven't built it into how you work

• You're uncomfortable with direct feedback, fast iteration or changing course when the evidence says to

How we hire

We keep this light and we respect your time. No whiteboards, no timed puzzles, no surprise tests. We want to understand how you think, build and work with people - and we'll flex the format if it helps you do your best work.

• First conversation (60 min)
  Meet Nathan, the Customer Success Team lead and Kina, the Product Lead for our core Build platform. Bring a story of a customer problem you unpacked and solved: the situation, the digging, what you built, what happened next.

• A challenge
  We only send challenges to people we're excited about, because we don't want to waste your time. You pick the format that suits your life: a paid day working with the team or a take-home on your own time. Expect something shaped like the real job: a genuine customer problem to unpack and a solution to sketch or build. We'll also want to see how you work with AI - we'll walk you through what that looks like after we meet.

• Final chat with Aaron (45 min)
  Our cofounder and CTO, on motivation, values, how you work and why BuildPass.

Location & other details

We're based in Melbourne and work hybrid, minimum 3 days a week in our Richmond office (the team's in Mon/Wed/Fri). This role also gets you out to customer sites and offices - it's one of the best parts. We're not offering visa sponsorship for this role at this time.

How to apply

You don't need to tick every box. If you're excited about what we're building and can show us how you think, we want to hear from you.