Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Pastel Africa

Pastel Africa is building digital financial solutions for businesses with the goal to get them to a place of financial accountability and success-one app at a time. Our mission is to build digital tools to unlock the potential of small businesses in developing countries. Our vision is to become a global leader in the micro, small, and medium businesses space, building tools that allow businesses to increase sales, process payments, access financial solutions, and immerse themselves in the digital economy.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Location: Lagos
Job Type: Full Time

Role Summary

• We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to drive the successful deployment, integration, and optimization of Pastel’s AI systems within customer environments.
• This is a highly strategic and customer-facing engineering role. You will operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer impact — ensuring our AI infrastructure works seamlessly in real-world banking and fintech environments.
• You will embed with customer teams, solve complex integration challenges, customize workflows, and ensure our systems deliver measurable business value in production.
• This is not a back-office role. You will be on the front lines of deployment and enterprise execution.

Key Responsibilities
Customer Deployment & Integration:

• Lead technical implementation of Pastel’s AI systems in customer production environments.
• Integrate with banking systems, fintech platforms, APIs, and legacy infrastructure.
• Align on architecture decisions with customer engineering, compliance, and risk teams.
• Troubleshoot and resolve deployment challenges in real time.
• Ensure smooth go-live processes and production stability.

Engineering & Customization:

• Write clean, production-grade code to support customer-specific requirements.
• Build integrations, automation workflows, and configuration layers.
• Optimize AI model outputs within customer operational workflows.
• Improve scalability, performance, and reliability of deployed systems.
• Translate ambiguous enterprise needs into technical solutions.

Product & Engineering Collaboration:

• Partner with Product and Core Engineering to translate field insights into roadmap improvements.
• Identify repeatable integration patterns to reduce custom engineering over time.
• Contribute to internal deployment playbooks and implementation best practices.
• Support pre-sales technical deep dives and solution architecture discussions when needed.

Customer Impact & Value Delivery:

• Accelerate time-to-value for new customers.
• Drive adoption of advanced AI capabilities.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor during critical engagements.
• Own customer outcomes end-to-end.

Expectations:
At Pastel, Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to:

• Operate with high ownership and accountability.
• Be proactive, resourceful, and comfortable in ambiguity.
• Move fast while maintaining strong engineering discipline.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Balance startup speed with enterprise-grade reliability.
• Represent Pastel professionally in customer-facing environments.
• Your work directly affects revenue, retention, and reputation.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions engineering, or technical consulting.
• Strong backend engineering skills (Python, Node.js, or similar).
• Experience building and integrating REST APIs.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or GCP).
• Strong debugging skills and systems-level thinking.
• Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders.
• Understanding of production-grade deployments and distributed systems.

Strong Advantage:

• Experience in fintech, banking, fraud detection, or risk systems.
• Experience deploying AI/ML-powered products.
• Knowledge of compliance, security, or enterprise data environments.
• DevOps or infrastructure experience.
• Experience operating in high-growth startup environments.

Travel Requirement:

• This role requires availability to travel to support customer deployments and enterprise engagements.
• On-site integration sessions with banks, fintechs, and enterprise clients.
• Travel frequency will depend on implementation cycles and customer needs.
• Candidates must be comfortable representing Pastel in professional enterprise environments.

Application Closing Date
Not Specified.

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online