Forward Deployed Engineer, Office of the CEO

San Francisco · 4+ years experience · Full-time · Onsite · Posted Sep 30, 2026

At a glance

Campfire is an AI-native ERP for financial operations. Accounting teams and fractional CFO firms at fast-growing companies use it to run their close, revenue recognition, AP/AR, consolidations and reporting. Ember, our AI layer, works alongside accountants on the ledger itself.

You will be the engineer who sits between the CEO's editor and main, taking PRs to production.
Your job is to figure out what each PR is trying to do, then decide what to keep, rewrite, or drop, getting it through review, tests, migrations, and deploy.
You'll work closer to the CEO and to customer priorities than anyone else on the team in this real engineering role with an unusual input stream.

Triage every CEO PR, read the diff, work out the intent, and decide whether to ship with fixes, rebuild properly, split into smaller PRs, or push back.
Make it production-grade by adding types, tests, and error handling, fixing N+1 queries, following existing patterns, and generating safe migrations.
Protect the ledger to ensure nothing posts into a closed period, model attributes exist, approval and audit flows are respected, and integrations hit sandbox endpoints.
Keep AI features honest by ensuring every LLM call the CEO wires up gets token tracking and spend-limit enforcement before shipping.
Guard reliability by routing errors through Sentry conventions, reporting failures once, and surfacing customer-fixable problems to customers.
Close the loop by fixing root causes when the CEO makes the same mistake repeatedly through better scaffolding, repo conventions, or tooling.
Say no well by explaining clearly when something shouldn't ship and offering a better path to the same customer outcome.

4+ years of shipping production Python.
Excellent code review instincts to read large AI-generated diffs and find critical production issues.
Taste and judgment about when to patch, when to rewrite, and when to delete.
Low ego and high candor with comfort pushing back on the CEO's code routinely.
The ability to reconstruct intent from incomplete specs and ask questions that resolve ambiguity.
Speed to prevent the PR queue from becoming a graveyard.

Accounting fluency: double-entry, accruals, ASC 606, month-end close.
Deep experience with AI coding tools, including knowing their failure modes well enough to prevent them upstream.
Experience with financial integrations (Plaid, Ramp, Brex, Stripe, payroll providers).
Early-stage startup experience.