Location: Vancouver, B.C. Full-time, 40 hrs/week
Contract length: ~4 months
Start date: Jan 2027
Salary range: 50,000 - 62,000 CAD
Deadline to apply: The posting will close November 10th, or whenever we reach 250 applicants, whichever comes first.
Applicants: Current students or Recent Graduates
The Role
Our forward deployed teams own a set of customers end to end. Engineers, solutions consultants, and technical support sit in the same pod, working the same accounts, with the people who use what we build close enough to interrupt us.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer Intern, you’ll sit inside one of those pods, in one of our three technical functions, Product, Data, or Engineering. The work is technical and the feedback loop is short, because the person your work affects has a name and you’ve spoken to them.
How this works:
Normally a team posts a job and hunts for someone to fill it. This process is backwards on purpose. We find the talent first, then go find the team, project, or problem that needs you most.
Process:
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Apply to the FDE track of our STRETCH program. Tell us what you’re good at, what you want to dig into, and why you want to be here.
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If it’s what we’re looking for, you’ll interview with us.
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Then the Early Talent team goes shopping. We pitch you to the teams, managers, or pods whose problems fit what you’re great at.
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You probably meet multiple teams or managers to explore what fits.
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If it’s a match on both sides, you get an offer for a role that was shaped around you.
This posting is open to three kinds of applicants. Most good FDEs are about one and a half of these. Tell us which interests you most, and we will go from there.
1. Product-Oriented Applicant
Types of problems you might get to solve:
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Users keep dropping off at the same step of identity verification. You sit with our support team, watch real user sessions, and propose the fix.
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Three customers asked for three different features that are secretly the same feature. You notice, and propose something that lands for all three.
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A feature request is raised two weeks before the busiest betting weekend of the year. You help decide whether it ships, waits, or gets cut.
Day to day work
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Talking to customers, support and engineers, and turning what you hear into something the team can build.
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Deciding what matters most: which bug, which request, which customer first.
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Keeping projects on track, and following up. A lot.
Key Skills
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Product Instincts: You notice when something’s confusing, and you can’t stop asking why. (Experience with user research, product lifecycle, user experience, user analytics, or tools like Jira helps.)
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People Instincts: You can work out what a customer actually needs, then get busy people who don’t report to you to deliver it. You follow up until it’s done.
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Voracious Learner: You’ll pick up enough of GeoComply’s products and stack to translate between customers and engineers, and to work out what’s actually feasible.
2. Engineering-Oriented Applicant
Types of problems you might get to solve:
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A customer’s iOS integration is failing on one device model, and they launch Thursday. You figure out whether it’s their code, ours, or Apple’s.
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A fraud rule works perfectly in testing but slows real-time decisions under load. You trace it, fix it, and watch the dashboards during rollout.
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The integration docs say one thing and customers do another. You close the gap, in the docs or in the SDK.
Day to day work
- Building and debugging the parts of our product customers actually touch: SDKs, integrations and APIs.
- Jumping on production issues while the customer is still waiting.
- Shipping code that gets reviewed by engineers who’ll tell you the truth.
Key Skills
- Engineering Foundations: You can read code you didn’t write and figure out why it’s broken. (Python, Java or Go experience helps.)
- Some of these, not all: system design, APIs and software architecture; cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and deployment tools; version control (Git) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Customer Instincts: Your number one priority as you build is for the people who will use your end product. You want to talk to them, and understand what is important to them.
3. Data Science / Analysis-Oriented Applicant
Types of problems:
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An investigator spots accounts that look unrelated but keep turning up on the same devices. You work out whether it’s a fraud ring, and what signal would have caught it sooner.
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A detection model is flagging real people alongside fraudsters. You dig into the false positives and find what it’s missing.
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A customer wants to know whether their fraud got worse or their detection got better. You design, test, and launch a model that tells us.
Day to day work
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Digging through identity, device and behavioural data for patterns nobody’s spotted yet.
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Building dashboards and reports that product, support and customers actually use.
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Testing and improving the models that decide who’s real and who isn’t.
Key Skills
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SQL and Python fluency required. Ability to work with large datasets and use query languages effectively.
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Some of these: statistical modeling; machine learning basics; data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI); working with large datasets.
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Data Instincts: You can take a messy dataset and a vague question and come back with something useful. You can explain what you found to people who don’t care how you found it.
This probably isn’t for you if...
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You want long stretches of heads-down building with no interruptions.
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You’d rather someone else talk to the customer.
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You need a clear spec before you start.
!!!! IMPORTANT! !!!!
If you really want to be here, every requirement on this page is negotiable.
The interns who’ve done best here were almost never the best applicant on paper. They asked for harder work before anyone offered it, built things nobody asked for, chased down whoever had the answer, and made the case for their own next role instead of waiting to be told what to do.
We call it PHD: Passion, Hunger, Drive.
If you’re just looking for a role where you can clock in, do tasks someone else assigned, and add another line on your résumé, that’s fine, but this program and company is probably not the one for you.
Your application is an opportunity to show us why we should bet on you.
Why you want to join the Early Talent Program at GeoComply:
Interns tell us three things make or break an internship:
- knowing what’s expected of them,
- doing real work that matters, and
- having someone to go to when something isn’t working.
So we built the program around those three things.
Clear expectations. Each intern is paired with an experienced manager that will supervise them day-to-day, give direction, feedback, and support throughout their term. From week one, you know the four things an intern is assessed on and what good looks like for each.
Work that matters. Every intern role is scoped with the Early Talent team and approved by senior leadership before it’s posted. Every project has to pass one test: what changes for GeoComply when the result ships?
Made, not hired. We’re as thoughtful about developing people as we are about building products. In your first month you’ll have a 1:1 with our co-founder and sit in sessions with our COO and VP of Product. At the end of your term, you’ll present your impact to senior leadership. A dedicated program team works alongside you from your first day to your last, so you have every opportunity to succeed. What you do with it is up to you.
What you’ll get
People who will push you. Our managers are told to give interns the hardest problems their team has. We have explicit rules against giving interns backlog tickets, busywork, or research that sits in a folder. The test for every project is simple: what changes when it ships? And the best projects keep running after you’ve left.
A hiring process built by an intern. The assessment you’ll take for the first round of interviews runs on a platform interns built from scratch, that replaced a $12,000 USD annual third party vendor. That’s the kind of thing that happens here.
A buddy who’s done this. Every intern gets a buddy who was once a GeoComply intern and now works here full time. They’ll introduce you to people, talk through your work with you, tell you whether something is normal, and be there to support you through the biggest weeks of your term.
Time with the people who run the company. In your first month you’ll have a 1:1 with our co-founder. You’ll also meet the senior leader over your team, and sit in sessions with our COO and VP of Product.
Permission to push back. We expect you to question how things are done. “Is this the highest-leverage thing I could be doing?” is a question we want you to ask.
A clear path to staying. 8-10% of GeoComply’s headcount started as interns. After a first successful internship, many of our interns return for a second semester, work part time until they graduate, or receive a return offer for full time work upon graduation.
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STRETCH Program Requirements
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You value Growth over Comfort: Change is part of who you are, not something that just ‘happens’ to you.
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You are a Creator: You've built, run, organized, or fixed something nobody asked you to.
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You have an Unexpected Advantage: An unusual background, a serious side obsession, a skill that doesn't show up on a standard resume.
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You are a Chameleon: You keep moving when the brief is unclear and the answer is not set in stone.
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You are Actively Curious: You go looking for how things work, and you can ask the right questions while you do it.
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This program is open to current students or recent grads of any discipline or background.
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$50,000 - $62,000 a year
Why is our salary range so large?
This role pays between $50,000 and ~$62,000 (annualized, prorated to your ~4-month placement). That's a wide band, and we'd rather explain it than pretend it isn't.
The range covers every technical intern we hire across three variables: whether this is your first product internship or your third+, whether you're at the beginning of your Bachelor's or at the end of your Master's, and actually extends beyond that for more senior / PhD or MBA level candidates who come into the Early Talent Program.
TL;DR: A first-internship bachelor's student and a Master's student with two years of work experience are both encouraged to apply: they just won't be paid the same, and they shouldn't be.
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This probably sounds harder than applying for a normal job, but this is not a normal job. Fresh ideas and talents are welcome here - and if yours catches our eye, we'll work with you to make it real.
If you need further motivation, know this: STRETCH is also an acronym. We'll tell you what it stands for when you get here.
