FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER

Thrive Creative Inc. - Calgary, Alberta (Hybrid or Remote)

Go where the problem is. Sit inside the business. Ship from the inside out.

Some engineering problems can be solved from a ticket queue. The ones we take can't. They start as a founder who knows something is broken but can't name it, a decade of process living in three spreadsheets and one person's head, and a system that was never designed so much as accumulated. Somebody has to go in, work out what is actually true, and start shipping against it.

That's this role. We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer: a senior engineer we drop into a client's business to find the real problem and then build the thing that solves it. You are the first person in and often the only technical person in the room. You run discovery, write the plan, build the first version, and stay long enough to be wrong about something and fix it.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

Most software gets built at arm's length. Requirements get written by someone who talked to the customer, interpreted by someone who didn't, and delivered six weeks after the business moved on. Every handoff sheds context, and the context is where the value was.

We got rid of the handoffs. That only works if the person building has watched someone do their job the hard way and understood why the obvious solution is wrong.

HOW THRIVE WORKS

Thrive Creative is a Calgary-based embedded engineering firm. We are not an agency that hands things off - we are a development department as a service that lives inside our clients' businesses. Their success is our success, and the commercial model is built that way: usage-based, no minimums, all IP theirs on creation.

Forward deployed engineers are the sharpest expression of that. You're not representing the team to the client - for that engagement, you are the team, backed by a small senior group and 50+ specialists you can pull in when a problem needs a specific weapon.

WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO

• Land and get oriented. Go into a new client cold. Interview the people doing the work. Read the codebase, the support tickets, the spreadsheet everyone quietly depends on. Come back in week one with a picture of the business its own team recognizes, plus a couple of things they hadn't noticed.
• Define the problem before you solve it. Turn a messy conversation into scope, flows, and tickets. Kill the requests that don't matter. Name the one that does.
• Build the first version yourself. Production-grade web and cloud applications. Modern JS/TS, React, Node, cloud-native on AWS. Real integrations with whatever is already there. Clean commits, tested code, observability from day one.
• Do the unglamorous parts. Data migrations. Auth that predates you. The import script that runs once and has to be right. Owning the ugly middle is most of the job.
• Work with AI as a collaborator. Claude, Cursor, whatever's on the frontier. Faster without sloppier. Know when to let the model drive and when to take the wheel back.
• Hold the relationship, then hand over. Weekly update, live demo, and the awkward scope conversation handled calmly with options. Then documentation someone will actually read, and a client team that can run it without you.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves

• 5+ years of professional software development, including production ownership. You've shipped, been paged, and lived with your own commits.
• Strong in a modern web stack: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, REST or GraphQL, Git, real cloud experience (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP fine).
• Integration instincts. You've made peace with someone else's schema and moved data between two systems that hated each other.
• Daily use of AI coding tools, with real opinions about where they help and where they hurt.
• Comfort being the only technical person in the room. You can explain a trade-off to a CFO and say "I don't know yet, here's how I'll find out."
• Calm in ambiguity. No spec, messy data, competing stakeholders, and a deadline is a Tuesday, not a crisis.

Nice-to-haves

• Agency, consulting, or solutions engineering experience.
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK), CI/CD, or serverless.
• A second discipline: design, product, analytics, data, security.
• Domain depth in something unfashionable - logistics, healthcare, field services, manufacturing.

Bootcamp, CS degree, or self-taught - we care about the work, not the path.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU

You will not spend three years on one product watching it barely change. In a quarter you might rebuild an intake workflow for a nonprofit, architect an AWS migration, and replace a decade of manual inventory process. It's the fastest way we know of to build commercial judgment - you see how a dozen businesses actually make money and where they leak.

• Competitive salary aligned to Western Canada for senior engineers, with clear paths up.
• Hybrid or remote out of Calgary, flexible hours, and respect for focus time. Occasional on-site client time where the work calls for it - light, and never a surprise.
• Certification support (AWS in particular) and a learning and conference budget.
• Grown-up communication: we do the work, we don't dress it up. You own real work from day one, the team backs you, and we'll tell you when something landed wrong.

HOW TO APPLY

Send us something that shows you. A portfolio, a GitHub, a Loom, a weird side project, a thing you wish existed. If you don't have those, a witty cover letter - one paragraph. A resume is fine, but it's not the interesting part.

Then tell us about a time you walked into a mess: what was broken, what you found out that nobody had told you, what you built, and what happened after. Never had that experience? Tell us why you want it.

Apply to: careers@thrivecreative.ltd