Forward Deployed Engineer Intern

Location: Sydney, Australia HQ Department: Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Employment Type: FullTime Location Type: On-site

About Us

Lorikeet is redefining what customer support looks like — and we're just getting started.

We build AI that handles complex, high-volume support for fintechs, healthtechs, marketplaces, and delivery services. Not chatbot-tier AI. The kind that actually resolves tickets, gives support teams their time back, and raises the bar for what software can do.

We're backed by over $50M USD from QED, Blackbird, and Square Peg, with backing from operators like Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-Stripe COO) and Cristina Cordova (Linear COO), plus founders of Canva, Atlassian, and Airwallex. We're the first company since Canva to be funded at early stage by all three of Australia's top VC funds — which tells you something about the calibre of people who've looked closely at what we're building and said yes.

Our customers include some of the largest telehealth, fintech, and marketplace companies in the US and Australia — many handling over a million support tickets a year. The problems are real, the scale is real, and the work matters.

If you want to build something that genuinely changes how businesses and customers interact — this is the place.

About the role

Our Forward Deployed team works between our customers and our product. They take a customer’s whole support operation (the tickets, the systems, the policies) and turn it into AI agents that resolve real customer queries in production.

As an FDE intern, you’ll be part of that team from day one, not on a side project. The workflows you build will go live and handle real conversations for some of the largest fintech and healthtech companies in the US and Australia. You’ll have close support from the team and real ownership of the work you take on.

Day to day, you’ll

Dig into customers’ support tickets and data to find where AI can fully resolve queries, and where it can’t yet

Build, test, and refine AI workflows from first draft through to production

Help connect workflows to customer systems through APIs, and test integrations before they go live

Join customer calls, share what you’ve found, and own defined parts of an implementation

Use Claude Code and other AI tools to speed up analysis, build internal tooling, and improve how the team works

You’ll leave knowing how AI agents are deployed end to end at scale in regulated industries. You’ll also have hands-on skills in workflow design, API integrations, testing and evaluation, and LLM fundamentals, and experience turning a customer’s messy real-world problem into a working solution.

We’d love to talk if you

Are curious and learn fast. You pick up new tools quickly and enjoy figuring things out.

Are technically confident. You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you’re comfortable reading API docs and working with data.

Sweat the details. You notice when something’s off, ask good questions, and follow through.

Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical people alike.

Are genuinely interested in AI. It’s a bonus if you’ve experimented with LLMs or built something with AI tools on your own.

What's unique about this opportunity?

A culture that's genuinely different. Low ego, high trust, no tolerance for talented jerks. We work efficiently, keep hours flexible, and actually mean it — because life outside work matters. We're committed to building a diverse team and actively encourage applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. We care far more about user obsession and eagerness to learn than traditional credentials.

A front-row seat to building something meaningful. We're Series A and moving fast. You'll have real scope to shape the product and the company — not just execute someone else's vision.

Performance recognized in real time, not on a calendar. Promotions happen when you're ready — leadership meets every six weeks specifically to identify and recognize strong performers, so you're never waiting for an arbitrary review window to move up.

We're AI-native, and we'll make you AI-native too. Every person at Lorikeet uses AI in their day-to-day work (current favourite: Claude Code), with unrestricted access and no usage limits. You'll leave with skills that matter for the next decade of work.

Twice a year, the whole company flies to Hawaii. Headquartered in Sydney, with teams spanning the US and UK — which means getting everyone in the same place is something we invest in seriously. We spend the time hacking on ideas, building things together that wouldn't otherwise exist, and making memories that remind you why you joined a startup in the first place.

A recruitment process built on respect, not hoops. We keep it simple: a couple of informal chats to share our story and hear yours, followed by a paid ~two-day work trial. The work trial is genuinely the best part — you'll work on real problems alongside the actual team, get a true feel for how we operate, and we'll both come out of it knowing whether this is the right fit. No trick questions, no take-homes that disappear into a void. Just real work, done together.

If you're from an underrepresented background and don't tick every box, please reach out anyway. We know firsthand that diverse teams perform better, and we're proud that our team reflects a broad spectrum of identities and lived experiences.