Refery for hiring teams
Hire a forward deployed engineer
Hire for the point where your product meets the customer’s systems, data, and operating constraints.
For founders, engineering leaders, and talent teams building customer-facing engineering capability. Specify the balance between coding, discovery, deployment, and reusable product work.
An illustration of how a Refery search is presented. The names and grades are examples, not real candidates.
Our clients are backed by investors including:
Make the role clear
Decide what the job is before the search starts.
An FDE owns implementation in a customer environment. A solutions engineer may focus on evaluation before a sale; a product engineer may focus on the shared product. These responsibilities can overlap, but the brief needs a clear priority.
Put these decisions in the brief
- The systems and data the product must integrate with
- Customer access, security review, and deployment constraints
- Travel, on-site time, time zones, and escalation coverage
- Ownership after launch and how customer work reaches the core product
- Must own
- The systems and data the product must integrate with
- Stage
- VC-backed, Seed to Series B
- Still open
- Location, band, and the first milestone
What to look for in candidate evidence
Three things a shortlist should show.
Discovery
How the candidate turned a customer complaint into a testable problem.
Deployment
An integration they built, its rollout plan, and how they recovered from failure.
Product feedback
How they distinguished a reusable improvement from a customer-specific workaround.
Start a search with Refery
One brief. Two networks. A reasoned shortlist.
Refery is a startup recruiting network for VC-backed Seed to Series B companies hiring Engineering, AI, and GTM talent. It combines specialist independent recruiters with referrals from founders, operators, and investors.
Refery charges 15% to 25% of first-year base salary on a successful hire. No retainer, no exclusivity, and a 90-day guarantee under the client agreement. Scope and fee are agreed upfront. See current pricing.
Send your hiring brief →Share the brief
Send the role, location, compensation, and the outcome the hire needs to own.
Confirm fit and scope
Discuss the search, candidate evidence, interview process, and commercial terms with Refery.
Keep the decision grounded
Use a consistent scorecard, capture interview evidence, and give specific feedback as the search progresses.
Before you set the budget
Compare like with like.
Compare roles with the same responsibilities and working arrangement. Our salary guides show dated public posting examples, with base salary, equity, and variable pay kept separate.
A question hiring teams ask
Does every FDE role require AI experience?
No. The required skills follow the product and customer environment. For an AI deployment, add evidence of evaluation, failure analysis, data handling, and fallback behavior to the integration scorecard.
From a real search
A recommendation that leaves room for the interview
A Refery recommendation highlighted a candidate’s hands-on delivery, end-to-end ownership and customer work, while asking the hiring team to probe the depth of work with technical customer counterparts. It also explained why the candidate preferred the role.
That is a useful distinction for an FDE search: customer exposure, implementation ownership and technical depth are related, but none should silently stand in for the others.
The useful lesson
Keep the evidence for the introduction and the client’s remaining assessment separate.
Read the anonymized search story →Explore other searches
Hire a founding engineer
Find an engineer who can turn an uncertain customer problem into a working product, then own what happens after launch.
See the search →Hire an AI engineer
Find an engineer who can make AI useful in a production workflow and explain how they know it works.
See the search →Hire your first GTM lead or seller
Choose the commercial problem first. Then hire the person whose experience matches it.
See the search →Choosing how to run the search
A referral network, a recruiter marketplace, a fractional recruiter and a fixed-fee service solve different problems. The options, grouped by model, and what each one publishes about its fees.