Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

Your work days are brighter here.

We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in the company, and we hope to be a match for you too.

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution, working across all of the company’s AI product teams. When the company launches new AI agents and platform capabilities, early deployments surface complex real-world challenges, from unstructured tenant data and intricate configurations to edge-case enterprise workflows. FDEs are the engineers who solve them.

The Developer Platform FDE team is where custom enterprise AI gets built. We work at the front line with customers creating their own AI agents and agentic apps on the company, moving fast from first conversation to production and solving problems no one has a playbook for yet. Using the newest tools in enterprise AI, we build agents that run on the company rails, reach people wherever they work, and deliver measurable outcomes for some of the world’s largest organizations: work that used to take days done in minutes, processes that run themselves, and better decisions across HR, finance, and beyond.

FDEs also serve as a critical feedback engine for Product and Engineering. You’ll work directly with the product and engineering teams behind our developer platform, turning field insights, recurring customer friction, and proven build patterns into scalable, out-of-the-box capabilities that reach every developer building on the company. It’s a team where deep technical skill meets real customer impact every day, and where you’ll actively shape what the platform becomes next.

About the Role

As a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer on the Developer Platform FDE team, you’ll bridge hands-on agent engineering with high-impact customer technical strategy, taking on the most complex, ambiguous customer builds where no existing playbook applies. You’ll partner with enterprise customers, often at the executive level, to architect, build, deploy, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic apps inside live customer environments.

You’ll work with the full the company Developer Platform stack. You’ll run custom agents on the company Agent Harness, the same agent runtime and infrastructure the company uses internally, and build them with our Developer Agent and industry-leading agentic tools, ADKs, and agent frameworks. You’ll give agents secure access to HR and finance data and actions through Agent-Ready Tools over MCP, connect them to each other over A2A, and surface them wherever users already work, from the company and Sana to the AI tools people use every day.

You’ll work across the full deployment lifecycle alongside AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and the company Services leads, taking customer agents from idea to production delivering real business results. You’ll also help set the technical direction for how custom agents get built on the company: turning field-tested solutions into scalable product capabilities, defining the patterns other builders will follow, and mentoring other engineers along the way.

Responsibilities

• Agent Engineering & Deployment: Architect, build, deploy, and debug custom AI agents and agentic apps to solve the most interesting problems in the enterprise, working against live data, business processes, and security configurations, frequently in situations with no established precedent.
• Customer Discovery & Agent Architecture: Lead technical discovery sessions with senior leaders at customer organizations, translating ambiguous business requirements into enterprise-grade product builds.
• Developer Toolkit Feedback & Influence: Be the first and most demanding user of our platform. Partner directly with product and engineering teams to provide critical, specific feedback that improves the developer toolkit for the entire the company ecosystem. Synthesize field telemetry, edge-case failures, and recurring friction into insights that directly shape the product roadmap and engineering backlog.
• Productization of Field Insights: Identify best practices and patterns and lead the work of turning custom fixes into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box product capabilities, along with the reference architectures, playbooks, and evaluation approaches that accelerate adoption.
• Building Total Agentic Systems with Fellow FDEs: Collaborate with FDEs across the company’s AI product areas to deliver complete agentic systems. For example, you might pair a custom agent built on the Developer Platform with the company’s first-party agents, orchestrate them through Sana over A2A, and ground them in Data Cloud.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as technical lead for your pod, shaping the product-improvement thesis at engagement kickoff and evaluating it at exit, guiding engagements through structured milestones to graduation within standard 6-month deployment cycles, and coaching other FDEs on agent engineering and customer engagement. The company Services owns the customer project; you own the technical agent-development workstream and the product insight it produces.

Requirements

• Basic Qualifications
• Experience: 10+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development, including experience leading complex, high-stakes enterprise technical engagements.
• Technical Execution: Hands-on coding and debugging skills (for example, Python, Java, or similar), with deep knowledge of REST APIs, object-oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns.
• Travel: Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.
• Other Qualifications
• Executive Customer Partnership: Demonstrated experience working directly with enterprise executives on complex software deployments, live data troubleshooting, and custom workflow integration, acting as a trusted technical advisor.
• Product Mindset: Skilled at abstracting durable, generalizable product requirements from one-off customer issues, and at using field insight to influence what gets built next.
• Communication: Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills; skilled at translating complex technical challenges for non-technical leadership.
• Ambiguity & Agility: Thrives in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales teams.
• Collaborative Leadership: A highly collaborative, low-ego teammate who mentors other engineers and helps multi-disciplinary account and delivery pods work well together.
• Preferred Qualifications
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agentic systems, including tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agent orchestration, evaluation, and building or consuming Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Agent2Agent (A2A) multi-agent systems.
• Experience building on the company platform, including tools such as the company Extend, the company Orchestrate, or the company Integrations, and a working knowledge of business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and how customers implement and govern the company, so you can read a customer’s tenant and understand how agents will behave inside it.
• Experience designing evaluations, observability, and guardrails for agents, including agent security concerns such as prompt injection, tool misuse, and least-privilege access.
• Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or platforms, and a feel for what makes a developer experience great.
• Contributions to open-source or community-based projects and libraries.
• The company Pay Transparency Statement
• The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. The company pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the company Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding the company’s comprehensive benefits, please click here .
• Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton
• Primary Location Base Pay Range: $206,400 USD - $309,600 USD
• Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $173,300 USD - $309,600 USD
• Our Approach to Flexible Work
• With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.
• Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, the company will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
• The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.
• The company is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision-making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law.
• The company prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodations, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.
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