Forward Deployed Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +2 more locations.

📋 Description

• Act as Render's inaugural Forward Deployed Engineer, engaging directly with key customers.

• Deliver a high-level technical partnership to premier accounts through architecture assessments, migration strategies, and hands-on implementation.

• Conduct concentrated onboarding sessions for rapidly expanding startups, from initial intake and success criteria to practical execution.

• Oversee the database aspects of customer interactions, focusing on Postgres architecture, performance optimization, and intricate data migrations.

• Propel activation and growth within strategic accounts by transforming credit grants into sustainable production adoption.

• Identify expansion opportunities from technical engagements and collaborate with the account team to convert these into revenue.

• Maintain ongoing technical relationships through architecture evaluations, health reviews, roadmap discussions, incident follow-ups, root cause analysis, and technical escalations.

• Develop the FDE playbook, which includes qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures.

• Convert customer challenges into prioritized product feedback for product and engineering teams.

• Collaborate with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure seamless transitions and sustained support.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in a customer-facing engineering position.

• Solid grounding in software engineering principles.

• Capability to write production-quality code and engage directly within a customer's codebase.

• Extensive knowledge of cloud infrastructure, including containers, CI/CD, networking, autoscaling, and managing real workloads in production environments.

• Advanced expertise in Postgres and database management, covering schema design, performance optimization, replication, and production data migrations.

• Familiarity with AI concepts and an understanding of LLM application architectures.

• Exceptional communication skills with startup founders, enterprise platform teams, and executives.

• Self-motivated and adept at navigating ambiguity.

• Ability to establish a new function in the absence of an existing playbook.

• Commercial acumen in linking technical achievements to growth, renewals, and revenue.

• Experience migrating from Heroku, AWS, or other cloud services to modern platforms (preferred).

• Practical experience in deploying AI and LLM applications, including RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, and inference workloads (preferred).

• Previous experience as the first hire or a foundational member of a new program (preferred).

• Applicants needing visa sponsorship must obtain business authorization; this position typically does not qualify for new visa sponsorship.

🏝️ Benefits

• Four weeks of paid vacation.

• Fourteen weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents.

• Long-term disability insurance.

• Life insurance coverage.

• 401K plans available.

• 100% employer-funded medical insurance.

• 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent.

• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) available.

• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health support, hobbies, etc.

• Monthly cell phone and internet reimbursement.

• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area.

• Home office stipends for remote Renders.

• Continuous learning benefits and related support.

• Equity opportunities.