Forward Deployed Software Engineer

Sage Recruiting is recruiting a Forward Deployed Software Engineer for an AI-native, early-stage infrastructure company building automated engineering guardrails for both human- and AI-generated code. The product turns engineering standards into enforceable controls that can run across commits, pull requests and deployments.

This is a deeply technical, customer-facing engineering role. The engineer works directly with customers before and after deployment, converts their real-world pain points into proofs of concept and production guardrails, and owns deployments in customer environments end-to-end.

Key responsibilities

• Join customer conversations, understand engineering pain points and translate them into working proofs of concept and production solutions.
• Present technical work directly to customer engineering teams and explain design decisions clearly.
• Own customer accounts technically after go-live, expanding use cases, coverage and trust over time.
• Deploy the product into customer environments and troubleshoot live issues hands-on.
• Write production code, primarily in Go, Python and Bash, often using AI-assisted development workflows.
• Contribute reusable guardrails and implementation patterns to a shared library used across customers.
• Work in the core product when necessary to unblock deployments or solve customer-specific problems.
• Take ownership of fixes when something breaks rather than handing problems off.

Core profile

• Strong coding foundation and comfort writing production code regularly.
• AI-native development habits, including meaningful daily use of AI tooling and experience building personal workflows or tooling around AI.
• Genuine interest in customer-facing engineering work, including listening, presenting and iterating directly with technical users.
• Exposure to cloud and operations concepts such as AWS, GCP or Azure, containers, deployment and infrastructure as code.
• High coachability, strong collaboration and a fast-learning mindset.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and taking ownership early rather than waiting for a fully defined playbook.

Useful additional experience

• Integrating with APIs and command-line interfaces in developer/platform ecosystems.
• Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Terraform, OPA/Rego or observability tooling such as Prometheus or OpenTelemetry.
• Platform-engineering experience in a larger organization.
• Founder, startup or other early-stage experience.

Prior experience with the formal title “Forward Deployed Engineer” is not required; the posting is aimed at strong developers who genuinely want to work with customers.

• Work model: remote role with occasional customer travel.
• Compensation: the captured posting lists a base range of $160,000–$210,000 plus equity; compensation currency may depend on work location.
• Benefits: the public Sage posting also describes retirement matching, health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, a health/lifestyle stipend and a flexible vacation policy.
• Success path: early weeks focus on learning and shadowing; by roughly 60 days the engineer is expected to own a customer relationship with coaching, by 90 days to run multiple POCs more independently, and over the following months to scale customer volume and ownership.