Forward Deployed Engineer at Brinc

About Forward Deployed Engineering at Brinc

At BRINC, we are redefining public safety with an innovative ecosystem of life\-saving tools. Our journey started with the development of drones and ruggedized throw phones, designed to access unsafe areas and establish communication to de\-escalate situations. Today, we've expanded into creating and deploying 911 response networks, where drones are dispatched to 911 calls to provide real\-time visual data, enhancing safety and enabling de\-escalation\-focused responses. Our cutting\-edge solutions are utilized by over 600 public safety agencies across America and the company has raised over $ We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed onsite with BRINC’s most critical customers and own their success in the field. You will support the installation and commissioning of BRINC’s end\-to\-end drone systems and live operational flights, triage and debug issues across hardware, firmware, and software, and implement fixes on\-site. You will be the direct line between the customer and engineering at headquarters, turning what you see in real operations into shipped features and resolved issues. This is a hybrid of software engineering, technical support, and product expertise, and

Companies like Brinc typically structure FDE teams around a build-team model, where engineers join an existing customer engineering function and deploy the product across a portfolio of accounts. Based on FDE Pulse data across 285 active postings, 7% of FDE roles are build-team positions and 2% are "first hire" situations where the engineer defines the function. Brinc's 1 active posting falls into the first hire category based on role count.

FDE roles across the market are 5% North America-focused based on 285 active postings. 0% of FDE roles are classified as growth hires, meaning the company is expanding its customer base rather than backfilling an existing position. This context matters for FDE candidates evaluating Brinc: growth hire roles often come with more pressure to ramp quickly but also clearer performance metrics tied to customer success.

What FDEs Do at Brinc

Forward Deployed Engineers at Brinc own the technical success of customer deployments. This means designing integration architectures specific to each customer's infrastructure, writing and maintaining production code that runs in customer environments, and serving as the primary technical point of contact for enterprise accounts. The role sits at the intersection of product engineering and customer success without being either.

Day-to-day work for an FDE at Brinc varies by customer complexity and deployment stage. In the early phases of a new customer engagement, FDEs focus on environment setup, data mapping, and building the first integrations. As deployments mature, the work shifts toward performance tuning, expanding use cases, and training customer teams on new capabilities. Some FDE roles also feed product insights back to internal engineering, effectively acting as a bridge between customer needs and the roadmap.

Career Path for FDEs at Brinc

FDE careers typically progress along one of three paths: deepening technical specialization within the FDE function (moving from mid-level to senior to staff FDE), transitioning into engineering management (leading FDE teams or broader customer engineering organizations), or lateral moves into product management (where customer-facing FDE experience is highly valued). All three paths are available at companies with established FDE programs.

The FDE market median of $180,000 base salary across 134 active postings reflects a market that prices the role at a premium over equivalent-seniority software engineers at the same companies. Total compensation including equity, particularly at venture-backed companies, can be 20 to 50 percent higher than base salary. FDEs considering opportunities at Brinc should evaluate total compensation, not just base salary, when comparing offers.

Interview processes for FDE roles at most companies include a technical coding round, a system design round specific to customer deployment scenarios, and a customer scenario exercise where candidates are asked to scope a deployment, communicate trade-offs, and handle technical objections. Strong candidates combine engineering depth with the ability to explain complex systems to non-technical stakeholders clearly and without jargon.

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