Forward Deployed Engineer

I don't ship from a docs page.
I ship from your customer's floor.

Most engineers can build the product. Almost none can sit across from your customer's ops lead, learn how they actually work, and ship the integration that gets the deal closed. I do that. 12 years across customer environments, multilingual stakeholder rooms, and production hand-offs.

The role you're trying to fill

You need someone who closes deals, not just commits code.

Your sales team sells the platform. Your engineering team builds the product. But the gap in the middle — where a customer asks "can it do this in our environment with our legacy systems?" — that's where deals die. That's where I work.

The integration the customer can't articulate

You walk into their telephony stack, their ERP, their messy spreadsheet workflow — and you map it. Then you ship the bridge.

The pilot that needs to ship this quarter

Standard onboarding takes 6 months. You compress it to weeks because you've done it 20+ times across logistics, fintech, IoT, voice AI.

The non-technical stakeholder room

Founders, ops heads, CFOs — comfortable translating their pain into a technical spec they'll actually approve.

The handover back to the customer's team

Documentation, training, SOPs. Not "here's the repo, good luck" — they own it after you leave.

Forward-deployed work I've shipped

Customer floors. Customer stacks. Customer ownership.

Voice AI — 1.5 years

SoftPod — self-hosted voice AI for enterprises

Embedded with enterprise clients to deploy on-premise voice AI on their GPU infrastructure

Walked into customer telephony stacks. Mapped their compliance constraints, data residency rules, and call volume patterns. Architected GPU orchestration on RunPod/Vast.ai with model loader panel. ~80% cost reduction vs commercial APIs — but only because I sat with their infra teams, not because I shipped a generic platform.

Manufacturing — Phase 1

Garment-OS — 8-module factory floor system

Designed end-to-end from on-site discovery with a garment manufacturer

Walked the godown floor. Watched workers hunt for rolls, cutting masters reject fabric without trails, defects vanish without vendor returns. Spec'd 7-step workflow, QR rack mapping, Hindi+English mobile UI, offline-first sync — built for hands that move fabric, not type on phones.

Logistics — Enterprise

Trucking ops portal for FMCG/petroleum/chemicals multinational

Diagnosed 45-day working capital bottleneck on-site, shipped fix in weeks

Sat with their dispatch team, their finance team, their client ops. Found the choke point: bills, deliveries, and reconciliation lived in three disconnected systems. Built the unified portal that compressed the cash cycle. Multilingual cargo audit trails, billing reconciliation, regulated SLAs.

Platform Eng — 2 years

Engineer at CEO's office — 10M-story platform

Operated as cross-functional engineer across content, product, and engineering leads

Two years embedded inside a 100-engineer platform org. Mentored senior engineers without formal reporting authority. Designed and shipped 11 projects across AI, mobile, growth, and partnerships — including a multi-team conflict resolution for an external content-sharing widget that everyone said was impossible.

Why I fit this role

Built for customer environments, not internal sprint planning.

20+ enterprise engagements end-to-end

Logistics, fintech, IoT, EdTech, voice AI. Pre-sales through delivery, every time. I know the rhythm of customer onboarding because I've owned it.

Comfortable with non-technical stakeholders

Founders, ops heads, CFOs, factory workers using Hindi-only mobile UIs. I translate, I don't lecture.

On-premise, regulated, compliance-heavy

Self-hosted GPU inference for voice AI. Data residency for healthcare-adjacent clients. I default to "what does your security team need to approve this?"

Multi-region, multi-language

Multilingual NLP at platform scale. Indian languages, English, customer-language UIs. I don't assume English-only customers.

AI-augmented delivery

Cursor, Claude Code, agentic workflows. Solo-architect throughput at small-team velocity — which means I show up at your customer faster than your team can.

Built and shipped, not researched

Every project on gouresh.com is live. Open them. Use them. That's the standard.

Let's talk

Tell me about the deal that's stuck.

20-minute call. Bring me the customer integration that's blocking pilot conversion. I'll tell you how I'd unblock it and how fast.