Forward Deployed Engineer
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: salary, visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
DepthFirst's standard text
About depthfirst
We believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization. Yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to secure the world's software.
depthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-days vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software.
Our founding team includes deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and LLMs with technical leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We are looking for strong technical people who are interested in working at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure.
About This Role
We’re looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer to help enterprise customers deploy and operate depthfirst in their environments. You’ll work directly with their security, infrastructure, and cloud teams to understand their architecture, navigate technical requirements, and own delivery from initial discovery through production readiness.
You’ll design deployment architectures, troubleshoot complex systems, and write production code to unblock customers. Each environment brings different infrastructure, security, and operational requirements. You’ll help customers work through those constraints and partner with our engineering team to build the integrations and capabilities they need.
You’ll also turn what you learn in the field into improvements that make depthfirst easier to deploy, operate, and scale across a wide range of enterprise environments.
You’re excited about this role because you will…
- Own enterprise deployments from architecture and planning through installation, troubleshooting, upgrades, and operational handoff.
- Work directly with customer security, infrastructure, and cloud teams to understand their environments and establish a clear path to production.
- Solve deployment challenges across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, identity and access management, and application configuration.
- Write code to unblock deployments, build integrations, and deliver new product capabilities.
- Build tooling and automation for onboarding, deployment validation, upgrades, and ongoing operations.
- Turn recurring customer needs into reusable platform improvements, working closely with our infrastructure, product, and security engineers.
- Communicate technical tradeoffs, dependencies, and progress clearly, keeping customer and internal teams aligned.
- Travel to customer sites as needed to support successful deployments.
Qualifications
- Experience building and operating production systems in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, SRE, or a similar role.
- Strong hands-on knowledge of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes, including deploying, debugging, and operating applications in production.
- A solid understanding of networking and cloud security fundamentals, including private connectivity, DNS, TLS, IAM, and access controls.
- Ability to investigate problems across infrastructure and application boundaries, identify root causes, and implement fixes.
- Proficiency in a language such as Go or Python, with experience shipping production code and automation.
- Experience with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability.
- Strong communication skills and an interest in working directly with customers. You can understand unfamiliar environments, explain technical decisions, and coordinate across teams.
- Ownership and sound judgment when requirements are ambiguous or a deployment doesn’t fit an existing playbook.
- Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.
Bonus Points For
- Experience owning technical engagements with large enterprise customers as an FDE, SRE, platform engineer, or solutions engineer.
- Deep experience with AWS and EKS, Helm, and Terraform or Pulumi.
- Experience with multiple Cloud providers.
- Experience deploying enterprise software into environments with strict networking, access, and security requirements.
- Experience supporting varied customer architectures and integrating software with existing infrastructure and operational tooling.
- Experience with AI platforms or security products.
What We Offer
- Competitive salary with meaningful equity.
- Health, vision, and dental insurance.
- Office lunch and dinner when working from our San Francisco office.
- Direct impact on customer success and product direction.
- The opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI and security.
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DepthFirst's standard text
depthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.
To all recruitment agencies: depthfirst does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to depthfirst employees. depthfirst is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.
What this role asks for
Standard for solutions / sales engineering roles
Python
Common in solutions / sales engineering postings at any company.
In most of DepthFirst's ads
Databricks · LLM
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
79% of this description is written for the role. The rest is DepthFirst's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with DepthFirst's other open jobs.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 9 open in Engineering. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in September: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Databricks (9 of 9), LLM (6 of 9), AWS (4 of 9), Python (4 of 9), IAM (3 of 9), Helm (2 of 9), Kubernetes (2 of 9)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Infrastructure Software Engineer posted Oct 22
- Senior Software Engineer, Corporate Security posted Sep 23
- Senior Software Security Engineer, Infrastructure & Identity posted Sep 23
- GTM Engineer posted Sep 15
- Security Product Engineer posted Apr 16
- Forward-Deployed Security Engineer posted Feb 10
- Product Engineer posted Oct 23
- Backend Engineer posted Sep 14
From the team and dates on DepthFirst's own job board.
Salary context
184 other open postings titled Forward Deployed Engineer state a salary: median USD 150,000 to USD 220,000 a year.
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