Forward Deployed Engineer, Video

Company Overview:
We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.
Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.
We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.
About the Role
Protege is hiring an FDE to support our video vertical. This is an engineering role with two key mandates: own the technical success of our video customers, and build the reusable pipes that enable future scale. You will partner closely with the GM of the vertical, product and platform engineering, Data Lab, and commercial teams to navigate external requirements and develop solutions to execute on those requirements. Protege’s video catalog already possesses hundreds of thousands of hours of raw video, this role will be instrumental in continuing to iterate on ways we curate, process, and deliver often bespoke and highly specific datasets to our customers.
This role is ideal for engineers who prioritize both constantly learning through solving difficult problems and interfacing and directly owning customer outcomes. You'll be responsible for managing customer requests, newly ingested partner datasets and architecture decisions all at the same time, often across multiple deals. The pace is fast, the ambiguity is real, and when deals are live, availability outside standard hours is part of the job. If this type of environment and ownership excites you, there could be a strong fit.
What You'll Do
Own Customer Engagements End to End
- Work with the GM of the video vertical, core technical teams, and commercial stakeholders from feasibility through post-delivery support.

- Translate a customer's model-development goals into an executable technical plan with clear acceptance criteria.

- Own the implementation and operation of the engagements you lead.

Evolve the Measurement Layer
- Build the tooling that turns raw footage into something we can describe and sell. Partner metadata is usually thin and inconsistent, so most of what we know about a dataset is what we measured ourselves.

- Our existing catalog is far too large for any one person to watch and curate from themselves. This role will continue to expand the ways in which we respond to volume requests on new and unique data requests

- Iterate on solutions for rapidly characterizing and quality checking unknown datasets to continuously expand our catalog offerings

Turn Deal Work Into Product Leverage
- Work in tandem with the product and core engineering teams to identify areas of growth for the platform based on customer requests and learnings from the front lines.

- Identify recurring patterns that should become d cross-vertical platform capabilities and contribute directly to designing and building them.

- Build the audio vertical's technical playbooks and quality standards so the function scales with every new request.

What Success Looks Like
30 Days: Learn and Ship
- Learn Protege's platform, our existing video catalog, active customer and partner portfolio, and current processing and delivery systems.

- Pair with an engineer on a live video deal to understand what a delivery actually looks like here.

- Map the largest gaps in the vertical's tooling and operating model, and propose a prioritized plan for closing them.

60 Days: Own End-to-End
- Operate and run an active video deal as the primary FDE.

- Build or meaningfully extend a tool or workflow that ca