Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Windows is where most of the world’s developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers, and own the outcome: the customer’s developers and agents running production workloads on Windows. This is a founding team; engineers will define the engagement model rather than inherit one.

Responsibilities

• Own forward‑deployed engagements end to end
  • Discover: embed with a customer’s engineering organization to understand workflow, constraints, and adoption blockers; define problem statement, baseline, success measures, and plan.
  • Build: design and implement solutions alongside the customer’s engineers, writing automation, configuration, provisioning logic, integrations, and reference implementations while applying security, privacy, maintainability, and supportability standards.
  • Validate: prove improvements in the customer’s environment with agreed‑upon measurements, not just demos.
• Be the team’s authority on Windows developer platforms at enterprise scale
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and WSL Containers, containers and virtualization.
  • Developer machine provisioning, configuration, toolchain and build performance, CI and inner‑loop latency.
  • Identity, security, and endpoint‑policy controls that affect developer productivity.
  • Diagnose friction that drives developers off Windows and fix it at the appropriate layer.
  • Build production artifacts such as configuration baselines, provisioning automation, diagnostic tooling, and reference environments.
• Close the loop with product engineering
  • Bring evidence back to Windows, WSL, developer tooling, and security product teams with rigor (reproductions, traces, measurements, business impact).
  • Drive fixes, supportability improvements, and telemetry additions through to shipping.
  • Maintain accountability for the customer outcome, not just the handoff.
• Scale what works
  • Identify repeatable patterns across customers and convert them into playbooks, reference configurations, tooling, and guidance.
  • Transfer knowledge to other Forward Deployed Engineers, Microsoft field and support teams, and product groups.
• Deliver measurable adoption outcomes
  • Demonstrate adoption through production developer workloads, telemetry, customer evidence, or agreed success measures.
  • Build trusted relationships with customer technical leaders, platform teams, and developers.
  • Communicate findings, trade‑offs, risks, and progress clearly to customers, Microsoft field teams, and executives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 4+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python (or equivalent experience).
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud background check (required upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter).

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep hands‑on experience with developer platforms and environments across Windows, Linux, and macOS, with a clear view of where each excels.
• Experience with several of: WSL, containers and virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration management, package/dependency management, build systems, CI/CD, and inner‑loop performance.
• Experience with enterprise controls that shape developer machines (endpoint security/EDR, identity and conditional access, application control, network policy) and a record of making developers productive within those controls.
• Customer‑facing engineering experience (forward deployed engineering, field engineering, technical consulting, escalation engineering, solutions architecture, or technical founder).
• Proficiency diagnosing performance and reliability problems using telemetry, traces, profiling, Windows Performance Analyzer, or comparable tooling.
• Strong programming and automation ability with a history of shipping production‑quality tooling.
• Ability to turn a solution built for one customer into a repeatable offering that benefits many.
• Experience representing customer needs in product planning and influencing engineering priorities with technical evidence and business impact.
• High agency, comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to hold hard conversations with customers while preserving relationships.
• Familiarity with the Windows app platform (WinUI, WPF, .NET desktop) and application modernization.
• Evidence of learning hard things quickly; a solid track record of acquiring depth rapidly.

Work location

Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of three days per week.

Pay

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 – $234,700 per year. For the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area, the range is USD $160,200 – $261,000 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for additional benefits and compensation.