Forward Deployed Engineer

Hi there!

We're Sweed, a product-driven startup building an all-in-one cannabis retail platform. We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to help us strengthen our team.

About Us

At Sweed, we’re reimagining how cannabis retailers operate. Our enterprise-grade platform combines POS, eCommerce, Marketing, Analytics and Inventory Management into a single, seamless solution—eliminating the need for multiple third-party tools.

We believe in simplicity, efficiency, and innovation. That’s why we build for scalability and performance, making life easier for cannabis retailers while driving real business growth.

Why We’re Doing This

At Sweed, we believe in the medicinal potential of cannabis. It has been shown to help with chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and many other conditions. Despite the lingering stigma, we see cannabis as a powerful tool for improving lives.

The industry is evolving rapidly, and we’re here to drive that transformation—making cannabis retail more efficient, accessible, and customer-friendly.

Where We Are Now

We’ve been on the market for 7 years, continuously growing and refining our product.

Our focus is on earning customer trust, which means constantly improving our delivery processes and rolling out new features. At the same time, we navigate the complex legal landscape of the cannabis industry, ensuring our platform remains compliant and future-proof.

Team Structure

Our total team size is over 200 people:

The development team is distributed globally and organized into cross-functional product teams. These teams typically consist of 8–12 members, including front-end and back-end developers, QA specialists, and analysts.
Meanwhile, our CEO, account managers, and customer success team are based in the USA, working closely with us to align product development with business and user needs.

About the role

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team ensures seamless client onboarding and integration within Sweed’s ecosystem. This role sits within our technical support team and is critical to our implementation process — the person in this seat will play a key part in helping us hit our end-of-year goal.

ETL — Extract, Transform, Load — is how a client’s existing data (inventory, customer records, transaction history) gets pulled from their old system, reshaped to fit Sweed’s data model, and loaded cleanly into their new environment. That process is the core of this role, but in cannabis retail, that work carries a level of precision, client-specific customization, and compliance alignment that most SaaS implementations don't require. That data has to move accurately and map correctly to state-specific compliance requirements, with little room for error. If you've worked in data migration for healthcare or military/defense systems, you'll recognize this instinct immediately: the data has to be right, not just moved.

Day-to-day, the critical elements of this role include:

• Starting the day in a stand-up — sharing what you're working on, flagging blockers, and hearing what the rest of the team is tackling

• Managing an active queue of implementation tickets and projects, moving each forward against its deadline

• Following and helping establish SOPs and checks-and-balances on every migration and ETL job — accuracy and repeatability matter as much as speed

• Communicating proactively the moment something looks off-track — challenges and revised timelines get flagged before they become surprises

• Jumping into emergencies when something breaks during or after hours — triage, stabilize, and keep stakeholders updated until it's resolved

What Background We're Looking For

Beyond the technical skills above, here's what we're looking for in your background:

• 2+ years in a technical implementation, integration, or data engineering role — SaaS platform experience strongly preferred

• Hands-on experience managing a queue of tickets and projects concurrently, each with its own deadline

• Comfortable following documented SOPs and quality checks — and speaking up when a process needs to change

• Strong technical acumen — you can troubleshoot a data or configuration issue methodically, not just escalate it

• A track record of clear, proactive communication when timelines or challenges shift

• Resilience and self-reflection — you can own a mistake, explain what happened, and adjust so it doesn't repeat

• Experience in a highly regulated, precision-critical data environment (healthcare, military/defense, or similar) is a strong plus — you understand why data accuracy isn't negotiable.

• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating the work of others — this role carries team lead responsibilities alongside your own implementation queue.

• A technical project manager by trait — you naturally break work into steps, track status without being asked, and keep things moving to completion even when the scope is ambiguous

What professional skills are important to us?

• Experience with data analysis, transformation, and ETL/data migration processes — experience with POS, retail, or other transactional data is a plus

• Well-versed in inventory, customer, and catalog data

• Ability to identify technical requirements and consult clients on integration with 3rd party platforms

• Programming proficiency in Python (required, intermediate level or above) and SQL

• Experience working with REST APIs, JSON, and CSV/DataFrame manipulation

• Highly organized, with a consistent track record of meeting deadlines

• Collaborative — works effectively across implementation, support, and product teams to keep launches on track

• Comfortable owning documentation — you can create and maintain the SOPs your team runs on, not just follow them

• Able to keep cross-functional stakeholders aligned on project status, movement, and hurdles — you're the one others look to for the real picture

• Strong verbal English communication skills — ability to lead client meetings and explain technical concepts clearly

• Comfort working in US time zones and participating in regular client-facing meetings (e.g. finance syncs)

Nice to have: experience with POS data migrations, Airflow, AWS S3, Metrc or other track-and-trace systems, or experience working in a product or implementation team at a SaaS company, especially in cannabis tech or adjacent industries Data migration experience in healthcare or military/defense environments, where precision and compliance are non-negotiable, is equally relevant.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success looks like:

• Tickets and projects move through your queue on schedule, with clear status at every stage — nothing goes quiet

• SOPs and quality checks are followed consistently, so errors are caught before they reach a client's live environment

• When something does go wrong, you flag it early, communicate clearly, and can show what changed afterward so it doesn't happen the same way twice

• Internal and client-facing stakeholders always know where things stand, because you told them before they had to ask

• You're a steady, reliable presence in emergencies — calm, communicative, and focused on resolution

What Else Matters?

• Proactivity – We love team members who take initiative and provide feedback

• Critical thinking – We value problem-solvers who think beyond just writing code

• Adaptability – Our industry is evolving fast, and we need people who thrive in change

What We Offer?

• Competitive base salary

• Medical, dental, vision, and additional health insurance options

• Paid parental leave

• Generous PTO and paid company-observed holidays

• Real ownership of high-impact work

• A path to grow — we're building out a structured implementation org and promoting from within

Sweed is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.