Forward Deployed Engineer

About Mafer

At Mafer we are building an AI data platform for R&D teams in formulation industries: flavors & fragrances, food & beverage, cosmetics, personal care, home care and specialty chemicals. We structure the molecular and formulation data that today lives across instruments, spreadsheets and lab notebooks, and turn it into systems that accelerate analysis, formulation and regulatory work.

We are a small, highly technical team of engineers and scientists, working from our office in Barcelona and backed by tier-1 investors. Everyone here works close to customers: you are either building or selling.

The role

Forward Deployed Engineers are how Mafer reaches production. You sit with the analysts, formulators and regulatory leads who will use the platform, learn how they actually work, and build until their data does something useful for them.

The work is split between the client's problem and our core product: what you learn deployed becomes the next module everyone else gets.

What you'll do

• Embed with client teams: sit in their labs, map their workflows, and find where the time actually goes.
• Ingest and structure their history — instrument files, spreadsheets with a decade of macros, scanned notebooks, supplier specs.
• Build and configure the modules on top: chromatography, formulation, regulatory, quality.
• Integrate with what they already run: ERP, LIMS, PLM, and whatever else the plant depends on.
• Bring the patterns back into the core platform, so the next deployment starts further along.

What we look for

• A solid engineer with at least 1–2 years shipping real software, comfortable in Python and with messy data.
• Genuinely technical, and equally comfortable in a meeting room and next to a gas chromatograph.
• A scientific mindset: you want to understand the chemistry and the process, not just the schema.
• High agency: you are dropped into an unfamiliar company and you find the path yourself.
• Fluent in Spanish and English, and happy to travel to client sites.

Nice to have

• Exposure to laboratory or manufacturing data (chromatography, LIMS, ERP, MES).
• A chemistry, food science or materials background alongside the engineering.

What we offer: a €5,000 relocation bonus and help finding housing near the office, 10% of your time on long-term research, and the shortest feedback loop you will find between building something and watching someone use it.

Hiring process

1. Apply below — we read every application and reply if there's a potential fit.
2. A 30-minute conversation with Fer (CEO) to get to know each other and align expectations.
3. A technical interview with Marc (CTO), around one hour.
4. Two days working on-site with us at the office in Barcelona, on a real Mafer problem: you see how we work and we see how you work.
5. We move fast: we aim to decide within three days of the last conversation.