Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Role Description

Vista is hiring Senior Forward Deployed Engineers to embed inside the engineering organizations of our 90+ enterprise software companies and ship production outcomes in their organizations, on accelerated timelines. You will own delivery end to end, from first discovery call through operationalization and handoff, working out of Vista's Product & Technology Practice but living inside a company's repos, CI/CD, and production reality for the duration of each engagement.

This is the Palantir FDE model, applied to the largest enterprise software portfolio in the world. Your output is the systems, workflows, and tooling that let engineers ship dramatically faster and at higher quality. The product features stay theirs. The engineering capability you leave behind is yours to be measured against.

What Makes This Role Different:

• Portfolio-scale leverage: A typical FDE makes one engineering org faster. At Vista, a system you prove at one company becomes a reusable accelerator across the next five.
• Vendor-agnostic and frontier-first: You are not implementing any one company's technology. You bring what actually works, not what a partner agreement requires.
• Compounding technical currency: Few roles in the market sit this close to the frontier for this long, across this many real production environments.

This is a remote position, with travel to portfolio company sites as required by engagements. Travel is expected to range from 35% to 50%, depending on the engagement. The role is available for an immediate start.

Responsibilities

What You Will Do:

• Embed with company engineering teams for focused 8 to 24 week engagements. Own delivery end to end.
• Work inside their repos, CI/CD, security review, and code standards. Leave behind systems their teams can operate, extend, and trust.
• Build advanced CodeGen and agentic workflows including custom subagents, skills, MCP servers, eval harnesses, background agents, and PR review automation.
• Implement evals, guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints sized to risk.
• Pair program and prompt alongside their engineers as a teaching mechanism, not a ghostwriting mechanism.
• Partner with engineering leadership to scope high-leverage opportunities with clear business metrics and acceptance criteria.
• Contribute patterns, accelerators, and reference implementations back to Vista's shared FDE and AI Ops playbooks for reuse across the portfolio.

What Success Looks Like:

• By month six, a strong FDE has shipped at least one engagement that measurably reduced KTLO burden or accelerated feature throughput, with metrics the company's engineering leadership signs off on.
• Left behind a working set of agentic workflows, evals, and tooling the company's engineers operate without external support.
• Contributed at least one reusable accelerator or playbook the next FDE engagement uses on day one.
• Built credibility with senior engineering leadership at the company, to the point of being requested back.

Qualifications

• 7 to 10 years of production software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping real systems at real scale.
• 3+ years of sustained, daily use of frontier AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Devin, or equivalent) on production work, with demonstrated advanced use.
• Demonstrated success driving AI or automation transformation at the enterprise level, ideally across multiple organizations.
• Comfort ramping quickly across languages and stacks (Python, Java, Go, TypeScript, C#, and others) based on the company you are embedded in.
• Cloud infrastructure depth on AWS, Azure, or GCP, plus containerization, CI/CD, and observability.
• Prior FDE, embedded solutions engineering, technical consulting, staff product engineering, or early-stage startup engineering experience.
• Willingness to travel 35% to 50%.

Desired Experience

• Built and operated agentic products in a commercial setting.
• Led AI transformation inside an AI-native startup.
• Built internal developer platforms or engineering productivity tooling that measurably changed how engineers worked.
• Worked across multiple companies or clients in private equity, consulting, or solutions-engineering contexts.
• Open-source contributions to AI tooling, evals, or developer-productivity projects.

Compensation

The annualized base pay range for this role is expected to be between $200,000 - $315,000. Actual base pay could vary based on factors including but not limited to experience, subject matter expertise, geographic location where work will be performed and the applicant’s skill set. The base pay is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other components may include an annual cash bonus and a comprehensive benefits package.

Company Description

Vista Equity Partners is a leading global investment firm that exclusively invests in enterprise software, data, and technology-enabled organizations across private equity, permanent capital, credit, and public equity strategies. Vista’s approach prioritizes creating enduring market value for the benefit of its global ecosystem of investors, companies, customers, and employees.