Forward Deployed Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch

  • San Francisco, California
  • 23 days ago
  • $185,000–$250,000 Per Year

Highlights

3+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Field Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Developer Advocacy, senior technical support, or a similar technical customer-facing role. Location: San Francisco, CACompany Stage of Funding: Venture-Backed Growth-Stage CompanyOffice Type: Distributed / Remote-FirstSalary: $185,000–$250,000 + Equity.

Numbers & Facts

LocationSan Francisco, California
Salary$185,000–$250,000 Per Year

Description

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: 
Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CACompany Stage of Funding: Venture-Backed Growth-Stage CompanyOffice Type: Distributed / Remote-FirstSalary: $185,000–$250,000 + Equity

Company Description

We’re representing a developer infrastructure company building secure, scalable compute and sandbox environments for developers and AI agents. Its platform enables engineering teams to programmatically create isolated environments for software development, CI/CD workflows, and increasingly sophisticated AI coding agents.

The company works with customers ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprise engineering organizations. This is a highly technical, customer-facing role with direct influence over both customer outcomes and the evolution of the core platform.

What You Will Do

  • Serve as the primary technical point of contact for enterprise customers, owning relationships from onboarding through ongoing support and expansion.
  • Work directly with developers and engineering teams to understand integration requirements and solve complex technical problems.
  • Reproduce, investigate, and triage customer issues across APIs, SDKs, CLI tooling, and sandbox infrastructure.
  • Build minimal reproduction cases and work directly with Engineering to identify root causes and drive timely resolutions.
  • Debug production-grade code and customer environments when necessary.
  • Translate complex technical behavior into clear, actionable guidance for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Identify patterns across customer issues and translate them into structured product feedback and feature requests.
  • Participate in technical scoping conversations with prospective enterprise customers.
  • Provide hands-on pre-sales engineering support alongside the go-to-market team.
  • Support integrations involving CI/CD pipelines, agentic workflows, and AI coding environments.
  • Act as the technical bridge between customers and the Product and Engineering organizations.

Ideal Candidate Background

  • 3+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Field Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Developer Advocacy, senior technical support, or a similar technical customer-facing role.
  • Experience at a developer tools, infrastructure, or API-first software company is strongly preferred.
  • Proficient in at least one programming language and comfortable reading, writing, and debugging production-grade code.
  • Hands-on experience working with and troubleshooting REST APIs, SDKs, and CLI tools.
  • Solid understanding of containerization and cloud infrastructure, including Docker, sandboxing, and compute environments.
  • Comfortable investigating complex issues across multiple layers of a technical platform.
  • Familiarity with agentic workflows and AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, or similar.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • Comfortable communicating with both deeply technical engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Able to manage multiple customer engagements simultaneously with strong prioritization and follow-through.
  • Comfortable operating autonomously within a distributed, fast-moving team.
  • Equally comfortable on a customer call and in a code editor.

Preferred

  • Production or debugging experience with Go, Python, or TypeScript.
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native deployments.
  • Experience with developer relations, open-source communities, or technical writing.
  • Experience working with PostgreSQL and diagnosing database-related issues.
  • Previous experience at an early-stage or growth-stage developer infrastructure company.
  • Familiarity with observability tooling, including logs, traces, and metrics.
  • Experience correlating customer-reported issues with underlying platform behavior.
  • Experience supporting AI development infrastructure or agentic coding environments.
  • Familiarity with GDPR and EU data residency requirements for enterprise software deployments.

Compensation and Benefits and Other Things

  • Base salary: $185,000–$250,000.
  • Equity included.
  • Location: San Francisco, CA.
  • Full-time position.
  • Opportunity to work directly with enterprise engineering teams while remaining highly hands-on technically.
  • Significant exposure to developer infrastructure, cloud environments, AI agents, and emerging agentic development workflows.
  • Opportunity to influence the product roadmap by bringing customer needs and recurring technical challenges directly to Product and Engineering.
  • Best suited for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous customer problems and wants to remain deeply technical rather than moving into a traditional sales or account-management role.

Salary Range: $185,000-$250,000 base. 

Similar Jobs

See more jobs