Forward Deployed Engineer

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. Column is a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers.

The Opportunity

We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). You'll define what this role looks like at Column. As an FDE, you'll work with customers to understand their problems in depth and help them build new products on Column's APIs. What you learn in the field will feed directly into how our engineering team improves the platform.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll write code, debug payment flows and design integrations, and spend time on-site with customers.

This role is based in our Presidio office in San Francisco, with frequent travel to customer sites in the US and abroad. You will report directly to the CEO.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with our partner's engineering teams to design, build, and launch products with Column's banking stack.
• Act as the technical owner for strategic customers from onboarding to launch, unblocking them on architecture, ledgering, reconciliation, and edge cases in money movement.
• Write production-quality code that speeds up integrations and grows into reusable product.
• Turn patterns from the field into product and platform improvements, working closely with engineering to shape our APIs, docs, and developer experience.
• Advise customers on how to build safe, compliant, and resilient financial products in a regulated environment.
• Represent Column in conversations with customer executives and engineering leaders, and build trusted, long-term relationships.

What We're Looking For

• Strong engineering fundamentals, ideally with experience in backend systems, APIs, or infrastructure.
• Product thinking: looking past the immediate ask to the underlying problem and the best solution.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills; ability to explain complex systems clearly to engineers and executives.
• Executive presence and confidence to lead high-stakes customer conversations.
• Strong project management skills; ability to run several customer engagements simultaneously.
• A self-starter mindset comfortable with ambiguity and building processes.
• Experience with payments, banking, or financial infrastructure is a plus.
• Fluency in Spanish, French, or Russian is a plus.