Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer Remote (U.S. based) - Occasional travel for customer visits (2-3 times annually) $160K–$210K USD base + equity Sage Recruiting is partnering with an AI-native, early-stage infrastructure startup that's tackling a problem every engineering leader is quietly panicking about: AI coding agents now write code faster than any human team can review it, and the old ways of enforcing standards (wikis, checklists, manual review) were never built for that volume. Our client has built a guardrails engine that turns a company's engineering standards into automated enforcement, on every commit, every pull request, and every deploy, for human and AI-written code alike. They're small, senior, and heavily AI-leveraged, moving with the speed and focus of a team several times their size. They've already landed their first paying customers and have real momentum building. Top-tier venture investors and an angel bench of well-known operators and creators from the developer tools world back them. This is a company at an inflection point between 'early traction' and 'real scale', and this hire is one of the people who will build that next chapter alongside them. The Role This is a customer-facing, deeply technical role, and it's a great fit for someone earlier in their career who is unusually resourceful, a strong coder, and genuinely energized by working directly with customers. Most of the day-to-day is pre- and post-sale. You'll be sitting in on customer conversations, understanding their real pain points, and translating that into custom demos, proofs of concept, and eventually production guardrails, mostly built with heavy AI assistance. Net-new deployments into a customer's own environment happen roughly once a month, and when they do, they're high-stakes, and you own them end-to-end. The rest of the time is spent deepening existing customer relationships and designing the next use case for them. What You'll Do Sit in on customer conversations, understand their pain points, translate them into working proofs of concept and, eventually, production guardrails Present your work directly to customers. This role requires being comfortable and credible in front of customers' engineering teams Own accounts end-to-end once it's live: more use cases, more coverage, more trust Handle net-new deployments hands-on, standing up the system in a customer's own environment and troubleshooting live Write real code, mostly Go, Python and Bash, mostly AI-assisted, that becomes part of the shared library every customer benefits from Occasionally dig into the core product itself to unblock a customer, when needed Own the fix when something breaks, rather than filing a ticket Who You Are: You're an AI-native builder who genuinely lights up around customer work, not just someone who tolerates it. You write real code daily and have at least some hands-on exposure to cloud and Kubernetes concepts. What matters most is hunger: you're coachable, a fast learner, and energized by owning something critical early in your career rather than waiting for a fully scoped playbook. You must have: An AI-native workflow already, daily use and then some. You've built your own tooling around AI, not just used off-the-shelf assistants A genuine love of customer-facing work: you want to be in the room, listening, presenting, and iterating with a customer, not just building in isolation Real hunger to learn and grow quickly. This matters more than years of experience A strong coding foundation Some real exposure to cloud and ops concepts (AWS, GCP, or Azure, containers, deployment, IaC). You don't need deep expertise here, but a baseline and the willingness to learn is a must High coachability and highly collaborative: someone who takes feedback well and improves fast NOTE: No prior "forward deployed engineer" experience needed. This isn't a fit for a classic solutions-architect profile. We're looking for a strong developer who's genuinely excited to work with customers, not a career pre-sales person. It's a bonus if you have: Experience integrating with many APIs and CLIs, especially in the developer and platform ecosystem Go, TypeScript/Node, Terraform, OPA/Rego, or observability tooling (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry), though nothing here is a hard requirement Experience on a platform team at a larger organization (you'd have natural empathy for who you're now building for), though startup scrappiness matters more than this A founder or early-stage startup background What Success Looks Like First 30 days: you're mostly learning. Shadowing past customer conversations, getting oriented on the product and the guardrail library. By 60 days: you're owning a customer relationship end-to-end, with real coaching support, building POCs, and presenting them yourself. By 90 days: you're working more independently, have customers live in production, and are running multiple POCs in parallel. Six months in: the expectation is roughly 4x the volume of the 90-day mark, with much less hand-holding needed. Why Join Real ownership from day one, with a direct line to the founder and a technical mentor shepherding your ramp Hard, meaningful technical work: you're not a support rep with a technical title, you're building things that ship A small, senior team moving fast, with heavy AI leverage and none of the bureaucracy of a bigger company A product and company that's passed the early-traction stage and is actively scaling, with real room for fast career growth Fully remote, with the team kept within a few hours of each other, so there are no late-night meetings Compensation & Benefits $160,000–$210,000 (USD) base plus equity 401(k) matching Healthcare, dental, and vision Life insurance Health/Lifestyle stipend Flexible vacation policy with a 4-week minimum.