Forward Deployed Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch

  • San Francisco, California
  • 30 days ago

    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. 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.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationSan Francisco, California
    Websiterecruitingfromscratch.com

    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, CA
    Company Stage of Funding: Venture-Backed Growth-Stage Company
    Office Type: Distributed / Remote-First
    Salary: $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. 

     

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