Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Santa Clara, California, United States, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

At Nirmata, our mission is to accelerate adoption of cloud native technologies for enterprises. We believe that software can radically transform the world and are building a solution to help enterprises deliver and operate mission critical software at scale. Nirmata is an AI powered Kubernetes governance platform.

As a customer facing Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Nirmata, you will act as an advocate that forms a critical bridge between our product velocity and the complex, real-world environments of our Fortune 500 customers. Unlike traditional roles, an FDE is embedded within the customer's ecosystem to ensure alignment of Nirmata's solution to key customer pain points, successful adoption of Nirmata's solution, delivering value and ROI realization.

You will be the single point of contact for all technical matters for your customer, providing leadership in architecting and operationalizing Nirmata's solution in customer environments. This role is a live R&D loop; you will actively discover hidden workflow gaps and feed field insights back to our Engineering and Product teams to shape the future of the Nirmata platform.

Responsibilities

• Custom Engineering & Proof of Value: Build working solutions against live production systems to demonstrate provable ROI and actual results tied to specific customer data and environments.
• Cloud Native and AI Expert: With Kubernetes becoming the orchestrator of all software and AI, you will be an expert that goes deep in Kubernetes and Nirmata solutions to build and run AI as well as provide expertise to use Nirmata's AI solutions to customer problems.
• Enterprise Implementation: Verify and implement detailed technical design solutions to address complex problems identified by customers, ensuring successful platform adoption.
• Technical Leadership: Lead key customer initiatives by understanding business implications and architecting solutions that meet operational, integration, and scaling requirements.
• Operational Excellence: Provide design and operational solutions for enterprise adoption of containers, including building necessary tools and automation.
• R&D Feedback Loop: Gather field insights and provide clear, constructive product feedback to Nirmata Engineering teams based on real-world customer requirements.
• Customer Advocacy: Manage technical escalations and educate customers with deep technical knowledge while documenting best practices for developing and deploying Nirmata solutions.
• Value Realization: Assist customers in defining, capturing, and documenting the actual financial value and ROI provided by Nirmata.

Education and Experience

• Experience: 4+ years of professional experience in engineering or technical consulting.
• Education: Bachelor of Arts/Science or equivalent degree in Computer Science or a related area of study.
• Location: Remote - USA/Canada.

Technical Expertise

• Kubernetes Internals: Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers, and container runtimes is mandatory. We are looking for candidates whose resumes prominently feature expertise in building and managing clusters.
• AI: Knowledge of leveraging LLMs, (LLM)-native metrics (e.g., tokens/sec, cost-per-request) and techniques securely and optimally using LLMs within an Enterprise. Ability to implement agentic workflows incorporating Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool-calling, and OAuth-based authentication.
• Cloud technologies: Knowledge and expertise in cloud technologies like virtualization, public clouds like AWS, and experience with tools for provisioning cloud resources like Terraform.
• Systems Administration: Proficiency in Linux OS administration and management.
• Infrastructure: Experience with internal development platforms, including standardizing and securing multi-tenant environments.

Knowledge and Skills

• Relationship Management: You are excited by facing customers each day. You have essential customer relationship management and account planning skills to ensure alignment with customer priorities.
• Consulting Mindset: You have an ability to adapt a consulting style appropriate to the situation and identify potential upsell opportunities during technical engagements.
• Communication: You possess mandatory strong communication skills for presenting complex technical prognosis and impact to senior management.
• Problem Solving: Ability to diagnose complex technical problems to their root cause in multi-technology environments.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to re-use existing experience to develop new solutions and shape technical strategies within the organization and for external customers.

ABOUT NIRMATA

Nirmata empowers organizations to innovate rapidly without compromising security or compliance. With Gartner forecasting that 99% of cloud security failures will result from misconfigurations by 2027, Nirmata's policy-as-code platform offers a proactive solution. Nirmata's highly customizable policies seamlessly integrate with your cloud-native environments, ensuring robust governance and security at scale. Trusted by top financial institutions and global enterprises—and with over 3.2 billion downloads of Kyverno, Nirmata's open source policy engine —Kyverno simplifies compliance, mitigates risk, and accelerates the enterprise journey to secure innovation.

Nirmata's success is built on the diverse contributions of its employees. We're committed to an inclusive workplace where everyone's perspective is valued, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, or disability status. All application information will be kept confidential in accordance with EEO guidelines.

Nirmata uses E-Verify for US-based roles, confirming work authorization after a job offer is accepted and the I-9 is completed. If E-Verify can't confirm authorization, we'll provide instructions on contacting DHS or SSA before any action is taken. See the Notice of Right to Work for details.

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