Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.

Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.

Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development.

We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.

Applying to Render

We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.

We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.

Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.

About the Role

We are looking for Render's first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with our most strategic customers. Our largest contracts and fastest-growing AI startups are scaling on Render, and this role provides them with a dedicated, concierge-level technical partnership. You will balance two motions: white-glove engagement with our top accounts, where you work closely with the customer's engineering team as a trusted technical partner, and scoped onboarding intensives that get high-growth startups confidently building on the platform. As the first FDE in our Field Engineering organization, you will define the playbook for this function, prove the model, and shape how it scales.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Render's top accounts as their dedicated technical partner, providing concierge service across architecture reviews, migration planning, and hands-on delivery.
• Run scoped onboarding intensives for high-growth startups, from intake and success criteria through hands-on-keyboard execution.
• Lead the database side of customer engagements, including Postgres architecture, performance tuning, and complex data migrations from Heroku, AWS, and other cloud providers.
• Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts: turn major credit grants into durable production adoption, surface expansion signals from your technical work, and partner with the account team to convert them into revenue.
• Own the ongoing technical relationship for your accounts: proactive architecture and health reviews, collaborative roadmap sessions, incident follow-up and RCA, and escalation point for hard technical problems, working closely with the account team.
• Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures that make the program repeatable.
• Act as a high-signal feedback channel to product and engineering, translating customer friction into prioritized product input.
• Partner with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure smooth handoffs after each engagement and durable long-term coverage.

Requirements

• 8+ years in a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role: forward deployed, solutions, customer, or professional services engineering.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals; you can write production-quality code and work hands-on-keyboard inside a customer's codebase.
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure: containers, CI/CD, networking, autoscaling, and running real workloads in production.
• Deep Postgres and database expertise: schema design, performance tuning, replication, and production data migrations. Our largest engagements consistently turn on this skill set.
• AI fluency: you work with AI tools daily to accelerate your own delivery, and you understand LLM application architectures well enough to guide the teams building them.
• Excellent communication with everyone from startup founders to enterprise platform teams, including executive-level conversations.
• Self-directed and comfortable with ambiguity; you can stand up a new function without an existing playbook.
• Commercial instincts: you understand how technical wins connect to expansion, renewal, and revenue.
• Nice-to-Haves
• Migration experience from Heroku, AWS, or other clouds onto modern platforms.
• Hands-on experience shipping AI and LLM applications (RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, inference workloads); many of our fastest-growing accounts are AI-native.
• Prior experience as the first hire in a role or a founding member of a new program.
• If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation.
• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
• 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
• Continuous learning benefits & related support.
• This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.
• We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!