Forward-Deployed Engineer, AI Platforms, SF
$200,000–$260,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Lead technical outcomes for enterprise POCs, from scoping to success criteria to implementation. Run pre-sales deep dives, demos, and architecture working sessions with customer engineering and security teams to get from prototypes to production. Troubleshoot integrations in complex environments involving identity, access, networking, security tooling, and observability. Design and build custom configurations or one-off solutions when standard paths fail. Serve as the go-to technical expert during sales cycles, handling hard questions from senior engineers and architects. Conduct onboarding and enablement sessions to get customer teams comfortable building on the platform. Maintain high agency and ownership by pushing forward when blocked, pulling in the right people, and keeping issues solved until deployment.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years in a forward-deployed / solutions / sales engineering / consulting-type role
- ideally with a strong CS or software engineering background
- Real technical depth: you can read, write, and debug production-grade code independently, not just wire up demos
- Hands-on experience building or integrating AI agents or AI-powered workflows
- opinions on architecture, memory, and tool design
- Depth in at least one relevant area such as identity and auth, security tooling, agent frameworks, protocol / integration design, networking, deployment, or observability
- An AI-native working style—you use AI tools to build faster and better, not just as a chat interface
- Executive presence: you're comfortable sitting across from senior technical and business leaders, asking sharp questions, and steering the conversation
- High agency and ownership: when something is blocked, you push it forward, pull in the right people, and keep going until it's solved
Desired Qualifications
- Prior experience in a similar role at a high-growth B2B SaaS or infrastructure startup
- Open-source work, writing, or talks related to agents, identity, policy, security, or adjacent infrastructure topics
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