Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Customer Engineering | Santa Clara, CA (in office 4 days a week) | Full-time

Are you ready to join an early-stage startup that secures the data and AI behind some of the world's most regulated enterprises? Be part of a team that is changing how enterprises secureand govern their data and AI, from inside the data store.

The Forward Deployed Engineer is a hands-on, customer-facing technical expert at the intersection of technology, customer outcomes, and growth. As an FDE, you are not just supporting adoption; you are leading it, hands-on, so customers unlock the full value of our client's product. You become a trusted technical advisor and product champion, guiding highly regulated enterprises as they secure their most sensitive data and AI in the cloud.

You will work directly with customer engineering teams and executive stakeholders to align our client with their objectives and measurable outcomes, and collaborate with Sales, Product, and Engineering to carry customer needs back into the roadmap. This is not a narrow support role, and it is not a traditional SRE position. It is a hands-on technical startup role for an engineer with solid customer skills: equally at home in deployments, troubleshooting, and architecture, comfortable scripting when needed, and confident in customer conversations. We want a true startup mindset: a bias to action, comfort with ambiguity, and the drive to build the playbook rather than inherit one.

What You'll Do

• Act as a trusted technical advisor from evaluation through adoption and expansion.
• Lead hands-on deployments and onboarding in customer Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, AWS, and Azure environments, with architecture reviews and technical validation. Our platform is built to surface first findings within hours.
• Provide hands-on support through rollout and beyond: troubleshoot APIs, integrations, and identity and access issues, and monitor account health.
• Write scripts and light automation where needed to fit our client's product into customer data, identity, and security workflows.
• Run technical demos, workshops, and readouts for security, data, and executive teams.
• Help customers turn findings across Identity, Access, Activity, and Exposure into concrete actions, operational workflows, and measurable business value.
• Support pilots, proofs of value, and rollouts, building strong relationships with champions, admins, and security and data leaders.
• Be the voice of the customer to Sales, Product, and Engineering: surface field patterns, product gaps, and roadmap opportunities.
• Create implementation guides, architecture diagrams, and playbooks, and help standardize repeatable processes.

Who You Are / Must-Haves

• Educational background in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 to 6 years in a hands-on technical role with customer interaction, such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Solutions or Sales Engineer, or Customer Success Engineer.
• Experience deploying and supporting enterprise software in customer cloud environments, with working scripting skills (Python or similar).
• Hands-on depth with Snowflake or Databricks, a major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and data warehouses or lakes, IAM, cloud security, or governance.
• Experience with security, observability, or IT operations, including managing data pipelines across the lifecycle (logs, metrics).
• Strong troubleshooting skills across integrations, identity and access patterns, and cloud platform behavior, with fluency in SQL, APIs, and technical logs.
• Solid customer interaction skills: you can lead a technical working session, explain architecture clearly, tie technical detail to customer outcomes, and drive adoption.

Bonus Points / Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying or operating data security, governance, or DSPM tools.
• Familiarity with containers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar).
• Familiarity with SOC 2, GDPR, the EU AI Act, HIPAA, or PCI.
• Active interest in AI governance and how enterprises adopt AI and agents.
• How we think about fit: We value hands-on deployment and support skill paired with solid customer interaction. If you love getting customers live, we want to talk.

Location & Work Arrangement

• Location: Santa Clara, CA
• Work arrangement: In office four days a week, where the best ideas happen in person.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $140,000 to $200,000, depending on experience.
• Equity: you own a piece of what we are building.
• Benefits: health, dental, and vision with FSA/HSA, One Medical, Health Advocate, 401(k), PTO, parental and bereavement leave, and team and company off-sites.