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Forward Deployed Engineer

External
speakeasy logoSpeakeasy · San Francisco
Full-timeOn-site3mo ago
ComplianceDocumentationObservabilityPlanetScaleRedisVercel
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About the role

Forward Deployed Engineers sit at the center of our customers, product, and engineering teams. You will work directly with engineering leaders, platform teams, security teams, and AI initiatives at some of the most sophisticated companies deploying AI today. This is not a traditional solutions engineering role. You'll operate across pre-sales, deployment, product feedback, and engineering, acting as the technical bridge between our customers and our platform. You will partner closely with customers from initial evaluation through production deployment. You'll lead technical discovery, design integrations, solve architecture challenges, build proofs-of-concept, influence product direction, and help define how enterprises securely adopt AI agents and MCP infrastructure. One week you may be helping a customer connect internal APIs to AI systems. The next week you may be designing access control models, debugging identity flows, implementing MCP governance, or working with our product team on entirely new capabilities driven by customer feedback. You will often be the technical face of Speakeasy and one of the first people customers trust with mission-critical AI initiatives.

Responsibilities

  • Drive Technical Sales
  • Partner with Account Executives on strategic customer opportunities
  • Lead technical discovery and architecture conversations with prospective customers
  • Design and deliver demos, proofs-of-concept, and pilot implementations
  • Help customers evaluate how Speakeasy fits into their AI, security, and infrastructure strategy
  • Translate customer requirements into deployment plans and product feedback
  • Serve as the technical owner for complex opportunities from evaluation through production rollout
  • Deploy and Integrate
  • Lead customer implementations of the Speakeasy AI Control Plane
  • Design integrations with APIs, MCP servers, SaaS platforms, identity providers, and internal systems
  • Build prototypes, proofs-of-concept, and deployment architectures
  • Troubleshoot complex technical issues across customer environments
  • Partner With Customers
  • Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering, platform, security, and AI teams
  • Translate customer requirements into technical solutions
  • Guide customers through architecture decisions and implementation tradeoffs
  • Drive successful production rollouts and long-term adoption
  • Build strong relationships with engineering leaders, platform teams, security teams, and AI stakeholders
  • Shape the Product
  • Identify patterns across customer deployments
  • Influence product roadmap and prioritization
  • Work directly with engineering to improve platform capabilities
  • Create reusable deployment patterns, documentation, and best practices
  • Build
  • Write production-quality code when needed
  • Build internal tooling and deployment accelerators
  • Create reference implementations and demos
  • Prototype new product ideas alongside customers

Requirements

  • Successful candidates often come from backgrounds such as:
  • Founding Engineer
  • Forward Deployed Engineer
  • Solutions Engineer
  • Platform Engineer
  • Infrastructure Engineer
  • Technical Founder
  • You are comfortable moving between code, architecture discussions, customer conversations, and product strategy.
  • We are particularly excited if you:
  • Have 5+ years of software engineering experience
  • Have built or deployed APIs, developer platforms, infrastructure products, or security systems
  • Have experience working directly with customers in technical environments
  • Can quickly understand unfamiliar systems and navigate ambiguity
  • Enjoy solving open-ended problems with incomplete information
  • Have strong communication skills and can explain complex technical concepts clearly
  • Care deeply about customer outcomes
  • Bonus Points
  • AI agent, MCP, or LLM application experience
  • Identity and access management experience
  • Security, governance, or compliance background
  • Experience with enterprise software deployments

Benefits

Performance bonus

Additional Information

About Speakeasy AI is moving from chat interfaces to operational systems. Across enterprises, AI agents are connecting to internal systems, using APIs, accessing data, and taking actions on behalf of employees. But while AI adoption is accelerating, governance, visibility, and control have not kept pace. Speakeasy is building the Enterprise AI Control Plane. We help organizations securely connect AI systems to their APIs, tools, and internal infrastructure while providing the identity, governance, permissions, auditability, and observability required to operate AI at scale. Our customers include companies like Mistral, Verizon, Cisco, Vercel, Redis, Glean, LaunchDarkly, PlanetScale, and Docusign. We are backed by Google Ventures, FPV, and Quiet Capital. Today, hundreds of companies rely on Speakeasy infrastructure across API platforms, MCP deployments, and enterprise AI systems. We're a highly technical team based across San Francisco and London, building at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, security, developer platforms, and enterprise software.


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