Forward Deployed Engineer (m/f/d)

The European trades are one of the least digitised industries left. Software
penetration sits under 15%, against roughly 70% in the US. The labour
productivity gap runs about 30%. Millions of skilled people spend their evenings
on paperwork instead of the craft they trained for — in the industry that has to
deliver the energy transition.

There is almost no incumbent software to displace. That is unusual, and it won't
last.

smalt replaces the back office entirely rather than selling Meister another tool
to manage. In the last six months that went from a partner app and a dashboard
to around thirty AI agents in production - pricing real jobs, qualifying real
leads, running the operations of businesses whose payroll depends on it working.

These days building thirty agents is easy. Knowing which thirty is what's challenging.

That only comes from being in the Betrieb and talking to the Handwerker.

That's what this role is for.

What you'll do

You'll sit in Handwerksbetrieben - at the Meister's desk, in the van, on site, next to our team -
and watch how the work actually happens. Then you'll come back and build the
thing that fixes it, often multiple times on the same day.

- Spend real time with partners. Not a quarterly customer call. You'll know
  our Meister by name, understand their P&L, and notice the thing they've
  stopped complaining about because they assume it can't be fixed.
- Build across the stack. Python/FastAPI services, Vue interfaces, Flutter
  screens, agent loops, data pipelines - whatever the problem needs.
- Own agents in production. Not demos. Agents that price real jobs, answer
  real customers, and cost real money when they're wrong. Reliability,
  evaluation, structured output, graceful failure.
- Decide what to build. You'll write your own acceptance criteria. Nobody
  here will hand you a spec, and waiting for one is how to fail in this
  role.
- Measure whether it worked. Hours saved per partner, offers that go out
  untouched, leads answered before a competitor picks up. If the number didn't
  move, it didn't work.

What that looks like in practice

In July one of our Meister got an early build of the partner app, ahead of the
general rollout. He tested it between jobs and sent screenshots: from a calendar
appointment he could no longer jump into the project to pull the customer's
phone number. He had a reply in two minutes. Within the hour he'd also asked for
a navigation button - tap the address, go straight to maps.

Neither was news. Both were already being worked on before he hit send.

We aim to be fast, and close enough to the work that we've usually seen the problem before the person living it has t