Forward-Deployed Engineer

Role Overview

As a Senior Forward Deployment Engineer, you will work directly with a strategic enterprise customer, combining hands-on software engineering with technical guidance throughout the customer relationship. You’ll design and deliver integrations, prototypes, and proofs of concept that address real deployment challenges, while helping the customer and internal teams shape solutions that can succeed in production.

The role also connects customer needs with product direction: you’ll identify opportunities to extend platform adoption, advise stakeholders on architecture, and bring practical feedback to product and engineering teams. You should be comfortable using AI tools to support your work and moving beyond traditional engineering boundaries into areas such as agent development, product ownership, and requirements analysis.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the customer’s primary technical partner, explaining platform capabilities in terms of their engineering goals and business priorities.
• Discover technical challenges and opportunities within the account, then collaborate with presales colleagues on proposed architectures and solution discussions.
• Scope and build tailored demonstrations, proofs of concept, and production-oriented prototypes for the customer’s systems and use cases.
• Design and implement integrations, deployment workflows, and data flows, with particular attention to the customer’s Google Cloud Platform environment.
• Work alongside customer engineering, infrastructure, and security teams to resolve architecture and implementation questions.
• Investigate and troubleshoot deployment, infrastructure, integration, and performance issues to help customer teams move forward.
• Share customer requirements and technical feedback with internal product and core engineering teams, helping inform enterprise-focused improvements.
• Use AI where appropriate to accelerate technical work, and contribute to adjacent activities such as agent development, product planning, or requirements definition.

Requirements & Qualifications

• At least 10 years of hands-on experience in software engineering, backend systems, cloud architecture, site reliability engineering, or a closely related field.
• Strong coding ability in one or more modern languages used in enterprise software, such as Python, Java, TypeScript or Node.js, Rust, or Go.
• Substantial experience with Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes, and contemporary CI/CD practices.
• Experience designing and integrating REST or gRPC APIs, microservices, data pipelines, and enterprise security capabilities such as SAML, OAuth, and VPC networking.
• Ability to work through technical designs with engineering teams and present architecture recommendations to senior stakeholders, including CTO- and VP-level leaders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, sound technical judgment, and the initiative to take ownership of ambiguous problems.
• Helpful additional experience includes AI/ML infrastructure, distributed systems, high-throughput data processing, or cybersecurity.
• Experience in forward deployment, technical presales, or high-touch technical account work—particularly at a SaaS or deep-tech company—is an advantage.
• Experience with financial services, payments, or fintech systems is beneficial, as is familiarity with Azure, AWS, or Huawei cloud environments.

What Success Looks Like

• In the first 90 days, establish strong working relationships with the customer’s technical team, learn their architecture, and deliver an initial production integration or proof of concept.
• By six months, be a trusted technical resource for the account and help reduce the effort required to launch new initiatives through clearer architecture and practical guidance.
• By the end of the first year, help broaden the customer’s use of the platform through successful proofs of concept, stable integrations, and proactive coordination of relevant product improvements.