Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Staff CX Forward Deployed Engineer

The company is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. It enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust the company to ship better, more secure software faster.

In our culture we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, expect every team member to incorporate AI into their daily workflows, and value collaboration and continuous learning.

Overview

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will close the gap between what our platform and the Duo Agent Platform can do and what strategic customers can activate today. Working with customers, account teams, and product and engineering, you will accelerate adoption in high‑value environments and turn challenges into reusable assets, architecture patterns, and product signals that scale beyond any single account.

This is a deeply technical, highly visible, customer‑facing role within the revenue organization. You partner closely with Professional Services Engineers, Project Managers, Customer Success Managers, Support Engineers, Product Engineers, Solution Architects, and other cross‑functional teams to connect business priorities to sound technical execution.

Performance Indicators

• Deliver measurable progress against defined success criteria for platform adoption, developer experience, and AI workflow activation in selected strategic customer environments, tracked quarterly.
• Increase platform and Duo Agent Platform adoption and consumption in assigned accounts, measured by usage growth, activation of priority workflows, and sustained usage over time.
• Reduce critical technical blockers and churn‑risk indicators, measured by issue resolution, time‑to‑remediation, and improvement in renewal readiness.
• Produce reusable tooling, architecture patterns, and reference implementations adopted across multiple customer engagements.
• Contribute validated product feedback, design artifacts, or code that results in platform improvements, upstream contributions, or broader internal adoption.
• Establish and evolve the company Well‑Architected Framework, measured by its completion, internal adoption, field usage, and application in customer environments.
• Convert customer‑specific learnings into repeatable guidance, enablement materials, and technical assets that improve consistency and speed across field teams.
• Earn strong stakeholder confidence through technical execution, architectural judgment, and measurable progress against agreed customer and account objectives.

Examples of the Work

• Build a regulated‑environment deployment accelerator for the Duo Agent Platform in a self‑managed or constrained environment.
• Author a reference architecture for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls.
• Create migration tooling or adoption patterns that move customers from source‑control‑only usage into CI/CD, security, and compliance foundations that make DAP valuable.
• Design a reusable compliance‑evidence generator or deployment validation framework that can be reused across multiple accounts.
• Investigate a recurring blocker, determine it belongs in product, and partner with Engineering on a design or code contribution rather than leaving the answer as a field workaround.
• Pilot an advanced DAP workflow in a lighthouse account, then package it for Customer Success, Professional Services, or Solution Architecture to use at scale.
• Partner with a strategic customer to identify a high‑value adoption bottleneck, prove a working approach, and turn the outcome into reusable guidance or tooling.
• Identify a geo‑replication gap in a self‑managed deployment, trace it to a root cause in Gitaly or the git backend, and contribute a targeted code or design change upstream.

What You’ll Do

• Conduct deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, understand constraints, and identify the highest‑leverage adoption opportunities.
• Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where DAP, platform migration, regulated constraints, and core‑product boundaries intersect.
• Partner with customer stakeholders and the account teams to prioritize high‑value use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, and repeatability.
• Design and build bounded proofs, deployment patterns, reusable components, and accelerators across SCM, CI/CD, security, compliance, and DAP workflows.
• Build rapid proofs or prototypes to validate promising approaches before hardening them into reusable assets, reference architectures, or upstream contributions.
• Design for reuse from the start so that each engagement leaves behind a durable asset such as a runbook, template, reference architecture, code component, design note, or product brief.
• Author reference architectures, deployment standards, and reusable accelerators that materially reduce time to value across multiple customer environments.
• Build hybrid tooling that lives between a product feature and a customer deliverable, especially in self‑managed, regulated, or migration‑heavy environments.
• Prototype, validate, and harden DAP workflows using custom agents, custom flows, the company APIs, MCP integrations, CI/CD automation, and policy‑aware deployment patterns.
• Architect self‑managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, AI Gateway, model connectivity, observability, and governance controls.
• Translate recurring field patterns into reusable technical guidance, reference assets, product briefs, and design notes for Customer Success, Professional Services, Solution Architecture, Product, and Engineering.
• Contribute production‑ready code, design docs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, with clear Engineering review and handoff.
• Raise the architectural bar through strong technical judgment, reuse discipline, and a clear bias against account‑specific one‑off solutions.
• Measure success through adoption lift, DAP usage, new lifecycle‑stage activation, reusable asset creation, blocker removal, and upstream impact — not through quota or case‑study production.
• Lead structured technical discovery in complex enterprise environments, mapping workflows, constraints, and organizational dynamics to identify the highest‑leverage adoption opportunities across the company and DAP.
• Partner with senior technical and business stakeholders to define phased adoption strategies, success criteria, and architecture decisions aligned to business goals.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments across security, compliance, platform engineering, and business teams to drive alignment and remove blockers.
• Recommend and prioritize adoption paths and use case portfolios based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long‑term platform value.

What You’ll Bring

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward‑deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer‑adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go; ability to read, reason about, and contribute to a large production codebase.
• Strong systems‑design and software‑architecture skills, including ability to reason about APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise‑scale systems that balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Hands‑on experience with the company CI/CD, pipeline architecture, YAML, runners, the company APIs, and the broader DevSecOps workflow.
• Deep curiosity about how the company is built, including comfort navigating platform boundaries and determining when a problem belongs in configuration, a shared accelerator, or core product.
• Track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, such as frameworks, accelerators, tools, standards, or design guidance.
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or core product capabilities in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Experience leading architecture conversations with senior technical stakeholders and navigating security, compliance, platform, and business tradeoffs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling, such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or equivalent approaches.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limitations of AI systems in production environments.
• Strong preference for experience with self‑managed the company, regulated deployment models, and familiarity with the company internals and contribution workflows.
• Strong written communication, including ability to author technical design documents, architecture guidance, and concise product briefs that Engineering and Product can act on.
• Customer‑facing experience in complex enterprise environments with the ability to navigate ambiguity without defaulting to custom one‑off delivery.
• Experience leading technical discovery and architecture conversations with senior stakeholders, including directors, VPs, and cross‑functional technical leaders.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into concrete technical direction, architectural decisions, and reusable solutions.
• Experience navigating complex organizational dynamics and building alignment across security, compliance, engineering, and business stakeholders.
• Track record of influencing product direction through field insight, technical design, reusable assets, or upstream contributions.

Required Qualifications

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward‑deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer‑adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise‑scale systems that balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Experience navigating ambiguous technical problems, conducting structured discovery, and translating findings into clear technical direction, implementation plans, or reusable solutions.
• Hands‑on experience with the company CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, and the company APIs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or equivalent approaches.
• Experience creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, such as frameworks, accelerators, tools, standards, reference architectures, or design guidance.
• Experience leading technical and architectural conversations with senior stakeholders and navigating security, compliance, platform, and business tradeoffs.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to author technical design documents, architecture guidance, and concise product or engineering briefs.
• Customer‑facing experience in complex enterprise environments, with ability to operate with high autonomy without defaulting to one‑off delivery.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, and the practical limitations of AI systems in production environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with self‑managed the company architecture, administration, upgrades, or air‑gapped deployment patterns.
• Direct familiarity with the company internals or contribution workflows, including experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, Sidekiq, Gitaly, runners, or adjacent backend systems relevant to the company extension points.
• Experience with platform engineering or internal developer platform concepts such as golden paths, paved roads, service templates, developer portals, or self‑service provisioning.
• Experience authoring reference architectures, design standards, or technical frameworks adopted across multiple teams or customer environments.
• Experience in regulated environments where security, compliance, auditability, or data‑sovereignty requirements materially influence architecture decisions.
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or core product capabilities in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Python or TypeScript experience for automation, integrations, prototyping, or AI workflow tooling.

Travel

Travel supports strategic customer engagements, team on‑sites, and key architecture workshops. This role is expected to travel less than a traditional billable consulting role, but up to 50% of the time.

How the Company Supports Full‑Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well‑being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Country Hiring Guidelines

Data science/engineering teams are remote and may have specific location‑based eligibility requirements. The Talent Acquisition team can help answer location questions after the recruiting process begins.

Equal‑Opportunity Employer

The company is proud to be an equal‑opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. Its policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex, national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information, or any other basis protected by law. The company does not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also the company’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.