Internship Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Denari is building the modern software stack for accounting firms: an AI-powered platform that unifies client collaboration, document management, workflow automation, and financial insights in one place.

We’re a small, well-funded team with a built-in proving ground. Our sister company, Lucida Tax + Accounting, uses what we build every day, so we hear how a solution landed within hours of deploying it.

We’re hiring Denari’s first Forward Deployed Engineer to turn real partner problems into working solutions.

You’ll work directly with accounting firms to understand how they operate, identify their highest-value problems, and rapidly build, configure, and deploy solutions using the Denari platform. That could mean creating an agent skill in Denari Answers, configuring a document schema, designing a workflow, contributing a targeted improvement to the core product, or building a lightweight application alongside it.

This is not a traditional software engineering role, and formal software engineering experience is not required. We’re looking for a technically confident, resourceful builder who can use agentic development tools to solve real business problems. You should be able to think like an engineer—breaking down ambiguity, understanding systems, testing your work, and owning outcomes—without necessarily having followed a conventional engineering career path.

The objective isn’t simply to deliver what someone requests. It’s to understand what they actually need, determine the most pragmatic way to solve it, get the solution into their hands, and demonstrate that it created value.

As our founding FDE, you’ll also help define the function itself: how we scope engagements, prioritize opportunities, measure outcomes, monitor deployments, turn one-off work into reusable capabilities, and carry what we learn back into the product.

You’ll report directly to Denari’s CEO.

We are genuinely open to change. If you have an idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, we will back you—whether that’s a new partner solution, a reusable skill, a better deployment process, or a new way for the entire company to serve customers.

AI has also changed what counts as “hard.” Things that once required a traditional software development team can increasingly be built by resourceful people who understand the problem and know how to direct modern agentic tools.

You’ll have significant freedom in how you approach the work. With that freedom comes ownership: identifying what matters, making sound tradeoffs, communicating clearly, and following through after something ships.

Denari Answers: Our agentic development platform for building and deploying skills, workflows, and partner-specific solutions.

Agentic coding tools: Tools such as Claude Code that help you rapidly build applications, integrations, automations, and prototypes—even if you are not a formally trained software engineer.

We care much more about what you can figure out and deliver with these tools than whether you can write every line of code yourself.

This is a hybrid role based in Madison. You’ll spend three days a week in the office with the team, and the rest of the week you’ll work from wherever you do your best thinking.

Because this is a partner-facing role, you’ll also spend meaningful time in calls with accounting firms and frequently working alongside them directly. You should enjoy building relationships as much as building solutions.

• Work directly with partners to understand their operations, uncover problems, and identify opportunities where Denari can create measurable value.

• Design, build, configure, deploy, and maintain solutions within the Denari platform.

• Develop and customize agent skills and workflows in Denari Answers.

• Configure document schemas, user workflows, and automations across the Denari platform.

• Use agentic coding tools to build integrations, internal automations, prototypes, and lightweight sidecar applications when the platform alone isn’t the right answer.

• Make targeted contributions to Denari’s core product when a small change can unlock meaningful partner value, with support from our engineering team where needed.

• Define success measures before deployment and demonstrate the operational or financial value created afterward.

• Monitor deployed solutions, respond when something breaks, and improve their reliability over time.

• Turn repeated partner needs into reusable skills, patterns, tooling, and product recommendations.

• Communicate partner feedback and field observations clearly to product, engineering, and company leadership.

• Help other Denari teams move faster, including developing automations and tools for our partnerships team.

• Establish the playbooks, standards, and operating rhythms that future Forward Deployed Engineers will inherit.

• You listen closely enough to uncover the real problem behind the initial request.

• You take ownership from the first conversation through deployment, measurement, and ongoing support.

• You choose the simplest approach that creates meaningful value.

• You can build something scrappy today while recognizing what would need to change for it to scale tomorrow.

• You try a new tool or approach on a Friday and demo it on Monday.

• You communicate early and directly when priorities, constraints, or expectations need to change.

• You treat service as part of the product and make partners feel that their problems matter.

• You disagree with us and say so because you care about getting it right.

• You move confidently across unfamiliar systems without needing to be an expert in all of them first.

We care that our co-workers care, even when we disagree. We’d rather hash out a real disagreement than watch someone quietly check out.

We’re not AI-pilled, but we think AI is clearly a complete game‑changer. We’re just another crew trying to figure it out, which means we stay open and experiment constantly.

Assertiveness and accountability. Speak up, commit, follow through, and own the outcome either way.

Collaboration and flexibility. Small team, multiple products, lots of context‑switching. We support each other through it.

Supportive by default. When someone’s stuck, struggling, or stretching into something new, the team shows up.

Service matters. We want our partners to feel that we understand their work, care about their success, and can be trusted to follow through.

• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to build trust with partners.

• The curiosity and judgment to turn ambiguous business problems into concrete technical solutions.

• Strong ownership, self‑direction, and comfort operating without a predefined playbook.

• A pragmatic mindset: you know when to configure, when to automate, when to build, and when the problem doesn’t require software at all.

• Confidence working across a broad range of systems, tools, and problem types.

• Substantial experience using AI agents in your day‑to‑day work.

• Experience using agentic development tools such as Claude Code to build useful applications, automations, or internal tools.

• The ability to measure outcomes and explain the value of what you delivered.

• Comfort working directly with customers and maintaining a high standard of responsiveness and professionalism.

• Clear, honest, upfront communication.

Formal software engineering education or professional software engineering experience is not required. You may come from solutions engineering, implementation, technical consulting, operations, product, accounting technology, or another hands‑on customer‑facing role. We care about your ability to understand problems, work effectively with technical systems, use modern agentic tools, and deliver reliable outcomes.

You might be especially well suited to this role if you have worked as a Technical Solutions Engineer in a complex software environment and have since become highly effective at building with AI development tools.

• You want requirements to be fully defined before you begin.

• You prefer to specialize deeply in one area rather than move between partners, workflows, agents, integrations, and product problems.

• You see customer conversations or ongoing support as distractions from the “real” work.

• You optimize for technical elegance even when a simpler solution would create value sooner.

• You enjoy prototyping but lose interest in deployment, measurement, documentation, or maintenance.

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance

• 401(k) with match

• 20 days PTO plus paid holidays