Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract)
realfast is an applied-AI strategy and engineering firm. We help software-driven enterprises turn urgent, high-stakes problems into products and platforms that move the metric. Founded by the team that scaled Gojek and backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) and RTP Global.
We started after ChatGPT, not before it, so there was never an old machine to retrofit. Every role, every process, every metric assumes agents do the grunt work and people do the judgment. Our people don't start from a blank repository — they build on Exo, our applied-AI platform, which is why four or five of them ship like a much larger team.
We hire for judgment, because everything that doesn't require it is already automated. What's left is the job.
Put more precisely: we hire people who have a high need for cognition. David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic:
“What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.”
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