Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Remote (UK / NYC, NY / MA / FL) · Full-time
Compensation: $150,000–$200,000 + equity

About the Company

A Series A AI infrastructure company that helps enterprises deploy AI systems that are reliable, secure, observable, and production-ready — providing the infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, and real-time guardrails to operationalize Generative AI at scale. It works with regulated industries including banks, government agencies, and insurance companies, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to top global banks.

Founded 2021 · 11–50 people · Industry: AI Tools

The Role

A Forward Deployed Engineer working directly with enterprise customers to deploy, integrate, and operationalize AI systems in real-world production environments — at the intersection of engineering, customer deployment, and AI reliability. You'd cover 3–4 concurrent customers, many running highly regulated systems with deeply embedded infrastructure and approval workflows.

What you'll be doing

• Lead deployments into customer environments: EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, and on-prem Kubernetes clusters
• Work directly with customer engineering, security, infrastructure, and operations teams across networking, identity, storage, observability, scaling, and reliability
• Troubleshoot production and pre-production issues across Kubernetes, application services, databases, ingress, authentication, networking, and cloud infrastructure
• Build deployment automation, Helm configurations, scripts, runbooks, and validation workflows
• Drive technical scoping, effort estimation, risk assessment, rollout planning, and production readiness reviews
• Partner with product and engineering teams to surface deployment patterns and integration gaps

Tech stack: Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, on-prem); Helm, Terraform, ArgoCD; AWS/Azure/GCP; identity systems (OIDC, SAML, Keycloak, Entra ID, Okta)

Requirements

• 3-8 years engineering, infra, or solutions
• Kubernetes production + AWS/Azure/GCP
• Startup or consulting DevOps background (NOT bank DevOps)
• Customer-facing deployment experience
• Helm, Terraform, ArgoCD, or comparable
• Remote UK / NYC / MA / FL, East Coast or UK hours

Green Flags

• Prior FDE, Solutions Engineering, or Implementation Engineering at a high-growth AI infrastructure or AI tooling startup. Direct domain match.
• Kubernetes production depth across EKS, AKS, GKE, or OpenShift. The role is hands-on cluster work.
• Worked on regulated enterprise deployments (banks, healthcare, government) with deep understanding of security, compliance, and approval workflows
• Familiarity with AI evaluation, guardrails, observability, or AI safety/governance products. Direct adjacency to the company's product surface.
• High ownership mentality with track record of driving ambiguous customer problems to closure independently

Red Flags

• Traditional DevOps background at banks or other traditional-sector enterprises. Hiring manager direct exclude.
• Pure backend engineer without customer-facing exposure. The role is 50%+ customer-facing.
• Cannot work East Coast US or UK time zones, or unavailable for twice-weekly evening calls with India
• No Kubernetes production experience. Hard requirement.
• Wants 9-to-5 or low-commitment culture. The role requires ambiguity tolerance and high ownership.

Why Join

• Ground-floor deployment role — 3rd FDE globally, owning the East Coast US / Europe territory
• High-impact work deploying AI guardrails and evaluation systems into Fortune 500, top-bank, and government environments
• Fully remote with competitive compensation and equity

Details

• Location: Remote — UK / NYC, NY / MA / FL
• Work policy: Fully remote; East Coast US or UK hours; twice-weekly evening calls with India team
• Compensation: $150,000–$200,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: None available
• Employment type: Full-time