Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Praetori; Haarlem; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Equity

Market-rate salary

Job summary

Praetori in Haarlem, the Netherlands, is seeking an engineer who sits beside operators, understands their hardest problems, and turns them into robust software that holds under pressure.

You will deploy into customers' environments, gain trust, prototype fast, ship to live operations, and return field insights to guide product roadmaps. Frequent travel and on-site work with defence, intelligence, and critical infrastructure customers are expected.

Qualifications

• You can show software you shipped into real use and explain the operational problem it solved.
• Strong, versatile engineering ability; you build end to end and move fast through unfamiliar systems.
• Record of shipping working software against ambiguous, fast-changing requirements.
• Judgement to know when to prototype and when to harden, and the discipline to do both well.
• Exceptional communication with non-engineers; you leave a conversation with the real problem defined.
• Comfort working on-site, travelling often, and operating in demanding environments.
• High ownership, low ego; fluent English.

Responsibilities

• Deploy on-site with defence, intelligence, public security and critical-infrastructure customers to understand their operations in depth.
• Translate messy operational reality into clear problems, then into working software.
• Prototype quickly against real workflows and data, iterating directly with the operators who will use it.
• Ship production capabilities into live, high-consequence environments, and stand behind them.
• Integrate with the customer's existing systems and constraints, including secure and offline environments.
• Become the trusted technical advisor to the operators and leaders you work with.
• Carry field insight back into the roadmap. Shape it with evidence, not opinion.
• Work within strict security and sovereignty requirements without letting delivery stall.

Job description

Haarlem, the Netherlands · Full-time · On-site with customers · Frequent travel

Praetori builds Continuous Control Infrastructure to secure Europe's operational independence. We are looking for an engineer who will sit beside operators, understand their hardest problems, and turn them into software that holds under pressure.

ABOUT PRAETORI

Praetori builds Continuous Control Infrastructure: one sovereign software layer that keeps the operational picture, the decision and the action connected while conditions change.

Operations move continuously and no system can keep up with them. When information fragments across tools and the situation shifts faster than the response, control is lost. Praetori closes that gap, so critical teams understand, decide and act as one, and hold sovereign control when external dependencies fail.

Our workflows are shaped around how critical teams actually work, tested against real public-security requirements, and architected for sovereign control from the start. We are in active, confidential engagement with defence and mission-critical organisations under operational pressure.

Our mission is to secure Europe's operational independence.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This role sits at the seam between what our customers need and what Praetori builds. Requirements documents do not capture how mission-critical work actually happens. The truth lives in the operations room and the field, in the workarounds people have built around the gaps in their tools. Your job is to go there, see it, and close the gap in code.

You deploy into a customer's environment, earn the trust of the people doing the work, and become the technical partner they call first. You prototype fast, ship into real operations, and carry what you learn back to the core product. You work with operators, founders and the engineers building the platform.

Within twelve months, customers will rely on Praetori for operations they once ran on spreadsheets, legacy tools or luck, field prototypes will have hardened into the core product, and operators will bring you their next problem before they bring it to anyone else.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Deploy on-site with defence, intelligence, public security and critical-infrastructure customers to understand their operations in depth.
• Translate messy operational reality into clear problems, then into working software.
• Prototype quickly against real workflows and data, iterating directly with the operators who will use it.
• Ship production capabilities into live, high-consequence environments, and stand behind them.
• Integrate with the customer's existing systems and constraints, including secure and offline environments.
• Become the trusted technical advisor to the operators and leaders you work with.
• Carry field insight back into the roadmap. Shape it with evidence, not opinion.
• Work within strict security and sovereignty requirements without letting delivery stall.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required

• You can show software you shipped into real use, and explain the operational problem it solved.
• Strong, versatile engineering ability. You build end to end and move fast through unfamiliar systems.
• A record of shipping working software against ambiguous, fast-changing requirements.
• The judgement to know when to prototype and when to harden, and the discipline to do both well.
• Exceptional communication with non-engineers. You leave a conversation with the real problem defined.
• Comfort working on-site, travelling often, and operating in demanding environments.
• High ownership, low ego. Fluent English.

Preferred

• Experience in a forward deployed, solutions or field engineering role at a serious software company.
• Background in defence, intelligence, critical infrastructure or another high-consequence domain.
• Familiarity with secure, air-gapped or edge deployments and the constraints they impose.
• An additional European language, and eligibility for security clearance.

WHY JOIN PRAETORI

Europe can no longer assume that the systems its critical organisations depend on will stay available, trusted, or under its own control. Praetori exists to change that. You would help build the sovereign infrastructure that secures Europe's operational independence, from the ground up.

The problems are hard and the ownership is real. You would work alongside the founders and a small, deliberately chosen team, with room to grow as the company does and the rare chance to shape foundational systems before they exist. If you have felt the cost of losing control, this is where you rebuild it.

OUR STANDARDS

We work with extreme ownership and low ego. We hold a high bar, first for ourselves, and we separate ideas from identity so we can argue hard and decide fast. We favour action over deliberation, say the true thing plainly and early, and put the mission ahead of comfort or hierarchy. Status here is earned by what you build, not your title.

PRACTICALITIES

ContractFull-time.

LocationHaarlem, the Netherlands. Hybrid, with regular time on-site.

Travel50%+, on-site with customers

CompensationA market-rate salary and meaningful equity.

EligibilityRight to work in the EU. Eligibility for security clearance.

If building infrastructure with real operational consequence matters to you more than comfort, we want to hear from you.

If you are unsure whether you meet every point but the mission pulls at you, apply anyway. We hire for capability, not a checklist.