The company
ThroughLine is the global safety net for people in crisis, helping millions access verified crisis support resources and guided self-help on the world's largest platforms – ChatGPT, Google, Pinterest, Roblox, Tinder – just to name a few.
We're solving some of the hardest problems at the intersection of mental health, AI, and global scale. That means working alongside a team of engineers, clinicians and operators who care deeply about getting this right, where the stakes are real and the work matters.
We move fast and we trust our people. You'll have real autonomy and responsibility from day one, and you'll be part of a team that's genuinely diverse because the people we serve are genuinely diverse. We're building ThroughLine to reflect that.

The role
We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer – someone with an engineering backbone who may not define themselves primarily as an engineer. Your job is not to “take requirements.” Your job is to figure out what actually needs to exist, then help build and ship it. You’ll spend most of your time working directly with customers — before, during, and after deployment — translating incomplete, messy, often unspoken needs into concrete system
behaviour. You’ll join pre-sales conversations with the Head of AI Product, lead delivery once we’re live, and stay close enough to the product to make real changes when reality disagrees with assumptions.

Why this role exists
Our AI care navigation platform guides users in distress through a natural conversation, understanding their needs and connecting them to the right next step. It is embedded inside customer’s products dealing with mental health, online safety, and crisis support.
These customers:

● Don’t speak in clean technical requirements
● Operate under legal, ethical, and emotional constraints
● Discover what they actually need only after deployment begins

The biggest risk isn’t model performance. It’s building something technically correct but contextually wrong. This role exists to close that gap.
You are the connective tissue between:

● Customer intent ↔ system behaviour
● Product principles ↔ real-world constraints
● What we thought would work ↔ what actually does

What you'll do
Customer-Embedded Work (~50%)
● Join customer conversations early and lead technical discovery through deployment
● Build customer trust by being clear, honest, and responsive
Product Translation & Building (~40%)
● Translate fuzzy customer needs into system design and behaviour
● Build and ship production changes that meaningfully improve outcomes
Internal Alignment (~10%)
● Feed real-world learnings back into product strategy

What this isn’t…
● Pure engineering. You'll spend half your time with customers, not coding.
● Building to spec. Customers arrive with messy, contradictory needs.
● Isolated work. You're constantly switching between customer conversations, product decisions, and building.
● Steady-state. Customer reality will disagree with your assumptions and you'll need to iterate.

What You’ll Bring
How you think
● You're comfortable with uncertainty, acting on incomplete information and adjusting as you learn
● You have product judgment, not just technical skill.
● You listen unusually well, catching what’s implied, repeated, or avoided.
● You’ve owned something end-to-end as a founder, early engineer, or first hire.
● You don’t hide behind role boundaries. If it affects the outcome, you engage.
● You care more about impact than identity. Labels are secondary to results.

Technical context
● You’re comfortable working across frontend and backend in production, modifying LLM-based workflows and shipping quickly without being reckless
● Our stack (for orientation): React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind (frontend); Node.js,
Python (backend); Google Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Vercel (infra); GPT, Gemini, Claude, open-weight models (AI)
● Depth in everything is not required. Good judgment about where depth matters is.

Bonus Signals
● Early-stage startup or social-impact experience
● Open-source or hackathon projects
● Proof you can ship meaningful work independently

What success looks like in 90 days
1. You’ve supported at least one customer from pre-sales through live deployment
2. You’ve shipped product changes directly informed by customer reality
3. Customers trust you as someone who “gets it” technically and contextually
4. The team relies on your synthesis, not just your output
5. Our deployments are smoother because of what you noticed and fixed

What we offer
The best benefit: your team
You'll be joining a small, senior, cross-disciplinary team:
● A technical product leader who codes, with three startup exits
● A former AI startup CTO and Samsung researcher-engineer
● A clinical psychologist who codes in Python and thinks in systems
Our culture
● We've all experienced times when we needed help – that's why we care deeply about this work
● We bring perspectives shaped by gutsy choices – immigrating, founding companies, career pivots, living our identities openly.
● We move fast but sustainably (no burnout culture here)
● We're collaborative and non-hierarchical – good ideas matter more than tenure
● We listen in all moments, whether things are going well or not (and not just on work stuff)
● We work with care and urgency because people rely on us on their worst days
● We start every week with a genuine personal check-in and end on Fridays with a check-out with a rotating leader
● We're technology realists who believe human ingenuity should be focused on reducing suffering

You shouldn't choose us if…
We're not a fit for everyone – and that's okay.
● We're driven, really driven: Our mission is personal to us. If you're not passionate about doing things differently with mental health support, you might find it a bit much.
● We're small: We're early on our journey, so no specialized roles and no "that's not my job."
● We're a startup: We're still figuring things out, which means incomplete information and unexpected changes.

At ThroughLine, we serve people across all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We want our team to reflect this too. As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome all applicants. We especially encourage candidates from underepresented communities to apply. If you think you have
what it takes, apply!