Forward Deployed Engineer

About Kenn

Kenn is a venture-backed startup building next-generation systems to power the future of agentic work. Wes McKinney, Phillip Cloud, and Marius van Niekerk founded it in 2026. Before Kenn, Wes created pandas and co-created Apache Arrow.

kenn.io · github.com/kenn-io

The role

Kenn is hiring a senior engineer to work with our customers. You will connect them with our engineering team: you get each new organization running, you own their support, and you bring what you learn back to the people building the product.

Inside Kenn, you will work with everyone on the team. Outside, you will work with enterprise buyers and with the engineering and security teams on the customer side. As the number of customers grows, you will hire the people who help you support them.

What you will do

Get customers running

• Plan each new customer's rollout with their engineering team, and stay with it until their whole team relies on our product.
• Take a customer's security team through their review of our product, and answer their questions about how it handles their data.
• Write the guides, scripts, and examples that make each rollout faster than the one before.

Own support

• Own every customer issue from the first report to the fix. Reproduce it, find the cause, and ship the fix or pair with the engineer who does.
• Spot the problems that repeat across customers, and turn them into product fixes, better docs, or new automation.

Speak for the customer inside Kenn

• Bring what customers need to our product planning, with the evidence behind it, and argue for it.
• Build the features and integrations customers ask for when you are the right person to build them.

Grow the team

• Decide when we need to hire for support and customer engagements, run that hiring, and train the people who join.

What you will build

You will build the support system Kenn runs on: how requests come in, how they are triaged, and how they get resolved. Agents should handle as much as possible: triage incoming requests, reproduce bugs, and draft fixes. You and the team spend your time on the problems that need a person, and you keep moving that line as the agents improve.

By the end of your first year, you will have onboarded a growing set of organizations and built a well-oiled support system that runs without you watching it.

Who we are looking for

• Works with customers. You have worked with enterprise customers who buy software from startups.
• Ships code. Everyone at Kenn ships code, and so will you. You debug systems, fix bugs, and build what customers need into the product.
• Digs into support. You want to find out why something broke and see it through to the fix.
• Builds with agents. You have built something with agents and can show it. Applying coding agents to support problems is a plus.
• Wants a startup. Startup experience is not required, but you should be excited to work at one.
• Senior. You can lead customer engagements and hire the people who join you.

Why join

Companies are changing how they build software around AI agents, and you will work with our customers while they do it. You will be the first person in this role, working with the people behind pandas, Apache Arrow, and Ibis, and what you learn from customers goes straight into the product, often in code you write.