Forward Deployed Engineer

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for a Forward Deploy Engineer who operates with clear ownership. You're not just answering tickets. You're setting the standard for what customer-facing engineering looks like. You believe the issue in front of you is the floor, not the job — the real work is making sure the next ten customers never hit it.

How You Operate

You are customer-first by default. When a customer hits a wall, you get them unblocked, and you measure yourself by how fast and how completely that happens. You bring mission-driven grit to every challenge, running toward hard problems rather than away from them. You prioritize customer outcomes over internal processes, and you choose truth and clarity over performative politeness. Being customer-first does not mean customer-always-right — you have the maturity to recognize an unreasonable request and handle it professionally: hold the line, explain why, and offer the path that actually works. The same judgment applies inward. You handle most issues yourself, and when a problem is truly a product defect or a relationship decision, you escalate deliberately to engineering or our CEO, with your diagnosis attached.

How are you using AI today in your current role? What specific tools are you using? If applicable, show us your last AI experiment.

What You Will Own

• Own the Response: Own technical requests end-to-end — integration setup, error troubleshooting, root-cause diagnosis — for the Praetorian Guard Platform, our unified Continuous Threat Exposure Management service spanning attack surface management, vulnerability management, breach and attack simulation, continuous penetration testing, and exploit intelligence. You are a credible technical peer to the customer's security team, closing the loop with answers they can act on.
• Scale Yourself Through Self-Help: Make customers self-sufficient. Build the documentation, video walkthroughs, and self-serve tools that deflect the next ten tickets, fix bad docs the same day, and use AI tooling to operate beyond what one person could handle manually. Success looks like an issue queue that shrinks as the customer base grows.
• Be the Customer's Voice: Turn recurring friction into well-formed product feedback. Know when the answer is "no, here's the workaround" versus "yes, this belongs on the roadmap," and back every recommendation with evidence rather than requests relayed verbatim.
• Ship the Fix Yourself: For simple changes — error message clarity, small UI papercuts — ship the PR yourself. Hand off larger problems to engineering with your diagnosis and reproduction steps attached.

What You Bring

• The Foundation: A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience, plus 2–5 years in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, customer success engineering, or security operations.
• Customer Presence: You handle people as well as you handle systems. You are credible and unflustered in front of a skeptical CISO, with writing clear enough to become documentation the moment you hit send.
• Troubleshooting Depth: You diagnose unfamiliar systems to root cause — auth, permissions, network, data — and verify out-of-band with tools like curl, dig, and nmap.
• Engineering Ability: You navigate a production codebase, scope a small change safely, and ship a reviewed PR.
• Teacher's Instinct: You'd rather make ten customers self-sufficient than answer the same question ten times, and you treat every repeated question as a defect in the self-help surface.
• Product Sense: You distinguish what one customer wants from what the customer base needs, and you back product feedback with evidence.
• AI Leverage: You use AI agents and automation to operate at a scale one person couldn't reach manually, without sacrificing accuracy or judgment.
• Security Fluency (a plus): Working knowledge of attack surface management, vulnerability management, or offensive security — enough to speak credibly about why a finding matters.

If This Position Is Wildly Successful, In One Year You Will Have:

• Driven your issue queue down even as the customer base grew, by systematically eliminating the root causes behind repeat tickets
• Built a self-help surface — documentation, video walkthroughs, and self-serve tools — that customers reach for before they ever open a ticket
• Become the trusted technical peer that customer security teams ask for by name, credible enough to hold the line on an unreasonable request and keep the relationship strong
• Shipped fixes directly to the Guard platform codebase for the small, high-friction papercuts, and handed off the larger problems to engineering with diagnoses clean enough to act on immediately
• Closed the gap between the field and the roadmap by turning recurring customer friction into well-formed, evidence-backed product feedback that engineering actually shipped
• Integrated AI tooling into your daily workflow, operating at a scale one person couldn't reach manually without sacrificing accuracy or judgment
• Raised the bar for what customer-facing engineering means at Praetorian, setting the standard the next hires are measured against