Forward Deployed Engineer (up to $220k)

About the role

This company builds a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes. The goal: let engineering teams focus on business logic, not failure mechanics. Their runtime is already in production at Fortune 500 enterprises, Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and frontier AI startups building production-grade agents. The founders are creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta's messaging infrastructure, backed by leading investors.

As the founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you won't just execute a playbook; you'll write it. This is a rare seat to define how the function works, from PoC playbooks and path-to-production patterns to reusable enablement assets and the critical feedback loop into product. You'll own the technical journey from initial PoV/PoC enablement through to production readiness and deployment, working hands-on with sophisticated customer engineers at major enterprises and AI startups.

Responsibilities

• Define the PoC playbook, path-to-production patterns, and reusable enablement assets for a new runtime.
• Own the technical path from PoC success to production readiness, including Kubernetes, cloud setup, observability, networking, and security integration.
• Work directly with customer engineers and OSS evaluators on integrations, reference implementations, and architecture guidance.
• Drive discovery workshops and POV planning, then feed friction and papercuts back into the engineering team, contributing to docs, examples, and SDKs.
• Take part in escalation and on-call rotations for critical customer issues, ensuring production stability.

Requirements

• Full proficiency in Go or Rust, plus at least one of TypeScript, Java, or Python.
• Strong Kubernetes skills, deep observability instincts, and hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• You've designed and operated real distributed backend systems in production, understanding failure modes from doing the work.
• A customer-success mindset: you go beyond immediate issues to understand context and activate internal champions.
• Comfortable being the technical face of the product in front of staff and principal engineers at Tier 1 banks and frontier AI teams.
• Eligible to work remotely from Europe.