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Forward Deployed Engineer

$80K - $100K Remote TX, US Mid Posted November 25, 2025
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Role Description

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer operates at the intersection of customer success, solution engineering, cybersecurity, data engineering, and AI-enabled automation. This role works directly with

U.S. power utility and government customers to solve urgent cyber and operational risk challenges while turning those learnings into repeatable, productized capabilities. AI-assisted cyber threats are increasing demand for rapid, customer-specific analysis. Customers need to know whether their current defenses can withstand machine-speed vulnerability discovery, exploitation analysis, and attack path evaluation.

This role addresses that need through embedded, hands-on engineering: quickly understanding customer processes, systems, data, cyber posture, and constraints, then delivering working solutions in approved customer or secure environments. This is a seasoned, principal-level individual contributor role reporting into Customer Success. This is an ideal opportunity for a senior technologist who wants to work on the front line of AI-era cyber defense for critical infrastructure, combining deep technical delivery with executive-level customer impact and commercial judgment.

Tasks

  • Work directly with U.S. power utility and government customers to reduce cyber risk, improve visibility, and respond to AI-assisted threats.
  • Quickly understand customer processes, systems, data, cyber posture, and business constraints.
  • Help customers answer urgent cyber questions, such as which products, vendors, components, assets, or supply chain relationships may be impacted by a newly announced threat or vulnerability.
  • Access, export, normalize, and compare customer data across vulnerability management,
  • Endpoint detection, network topology, attack path tooling, asset inventories, software bills of materials (SBOMs), business impact analysis, and supply chain mapping.
  • Write secure, outcome-focused code, including agentic workflows and batch jobs, to surface insights quickly in approved customer or secure environments.
  • Convert bespoke customer work into product requirements that Product Management can formalize into scalable software capabilities.
  • Identify expansion opportunities by demonstrating customer value, shaping repeatable usecases, and connecting services-led problem solving to embedded platform capabilities.
  • Present findings clearly to customer executives, technical teams, and internalstakeholders.

Requirements

  • 7-10 years experience combining software/data engineering, cybersecurity analysis, and customer-facing solution engineering at a senior or principal level.
  • Hands-on experience developing AI-agentic workflows (LLM-based automation, agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented pipelines, or similar).
  • Demonstrated ability to access, normalize, and analyze large, messy, multi-source data sets to answer urgent operational questions.
  • Ability to write pragmatic, secure, production-appropriate code (e.g., Python or similar) in constrained or regulated environments.
  • Strong executive communication skills, including presenting complex technical findings to customer leadership.
  • Ability to operate independently in embedded customer environments and manage competing priorities.
  • Must be eligible for a U.S. security clearance; successful completion of a background check is required.

Experience with U.S. electric utilities or other critical infrastructure sectors.

Familiarity with OT/ICS environments and their operational and remediation constraints.

Knowledge of NERC CIP or comparable regulatory frameworks.

Experience with vulnerability management, attack path analysis, and endpoint/security tooling.

Experience with supply chain risk management (SCRM), SBOM/VEX analysis, and third- party risk workflows.

Commercial judgment: shaping repeatable use cases and identifying expansion

opportunities.

Bachelor'sdegree in computer science, engineering, cybersecurity, or a related field

required.

Advanced degree or relevant certifications (e.g., security or cloud) preferred.

Benefits

Remote work, United States

About Forward Deployed Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.

Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.

Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.

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