Field Engineer

Tetrate; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tetrate is seeking a Field Engineer in the United States to own the technical relationship from first contact through production and expansion. You will land it, get it live, and grow adoption and revenue within our enterprise environments.

Working hands-on inside large customer environments, you will ensure the AI gateway and application networking run reliably in production, with end-to-end ownership from start to finish.

Qualifications

• Full-lifecycle technical track record evidenced by winning technical evaluations and deploying in production.
• Hands-on systems fluency: terminal, Linux internals, Kubernetes, core networking (TCP/IP, HTTP/gRPC, TLS, DNS), and scripting (Go, Python, Bash).
• High-agency problem solving: solve firewalls, VPCs, and compliance tickets.
• Commercial and organizational awareness: read client dynamics and spot expansion while troubleshooting.
• Willingness to travel 25–50% to customer sites.

Responsibilities

• Win the technical evaluation: lead POCs, demos, and architecture workshops through close; address security, identity, reliability, and scale objections.

Skills

Kubernetes

Networking

Scripting

Linux

Tools

Go

Python

Bash

Job description

Tetrate will become the standard for running AI at scale in the enterprise. Today we give some of the most demanding organizations in the world, including the U.S. Department of Defense and leading global banks, control over how their applications and AI systems communicate, where security, uptime, and governance are non-negotiable.

That is the bar, and most AI teams are nowhere near it. They want fast, dependable tools and inherit scattered API keys, no cost visibility, no policy enforcement, no fallback when a provider fails, and a six-month infrastructure project before production. You cannot govern or optimize what you cannot see, and as AI becomes how business runs, every enterprise ends up with this problem.

Our answer is a global AI traffic orchestration layer, built on Envoy. The market calls today’s early version the AI gateway, but as agents multiply and start calling models, tools, and each other, this is where cost, policy, identity, and reliability get decided, for humans and agents alike. With Agent Router and Envoy AI Gateway, policy is set once and enforced anywhere the workload runs, on-prem, in-region, or at the edge, so ROI and data sovereignty stop competing. Envoy already moves traffic at this scale, and eight years in tier 0 infrastructure means we know what an audit and a 3 a.m. incident actually demand. This ships as a product, not a transformation program, and it is the chapter we are building a global revenue engine around.

Role summary

As a Field Engineer at Tetrate, you own the technical relationship with an account from first contact through production and expansion. One person carries the whole arc: you earn the customer’s confidence on technical merit, get the technology live in their environment, and grow adoption and revenue. Working hands-on-keyboard inside our largest customer environments, you make our API and AI traffic orchestration layer and application networking run reliably in production, and you are accountable for the full result: landing it, getting it live, and expanding it. This is end-to-end ownership, and it is how we build trust and accountability. You carry the account, start to finish.

You tackle the operational and architectural friction of large enterprises, legacy topologies, strict IAM policies, and rigid change controls, turning complex integrations into working deployments. You run the technical evaluation that wins the deal, build trust with the customer’s platform and security teams, deploy into production, and use that ground truth to surface and drive expansion, feeding field intelligence back to our engineering teams to harden the platform. Expect 25 to 50% travel to customer sites.

Responsibilities

• Win the technical evaluation: lead POCs, demos, and architecture workshops that take a deal to signed, partner with the Account Executive through close, and clear technical objections on security, identity, reliability, and scale.
• Deploy hands-on in production: write production-grade integration code, deployment scripts, Helm charts, and Envoy configurations to integrate Tetrate’s AI gateway and application networking into complex enterprise environments.
• Resolve enterprise friction: debug network routing, mTLS identity federation, proxy configurations, and third-party security tooling constraints at enterprise scale.
• Own and drive account expansion: spot and shape new workloads during delivery, build the technical business case with the champion, and convert production success into expansion revenue and signed growth.
• Build trust and run technical reconnaissance: map the customer’s systems, assess dependencies, and surface expansion opportunities you can actively drive.
• Bridge field and product: document edge cases and integration patterns, and feed structured feedback and pull requests to Tetrate’s engineering teams.
• Champion operational excellence: ensure deployments meet security reviews, audits, and tier 0 production standards without accumulating technical debt.

Required qualifications

• Full-lifecycle technical track record: you have both won technical evaluations and deployed in production, whether as a forward deployed or field engineer, a sales or solutions engineer who also implements, or a software engineer with customer-facing delivery.
• Hands-on systems fluency: terminal, Linux internals, Kubernetes, core networking (TCP/IP, HTTP/gRPC, TLS, DNS), and scripting (Go, Python, or Bash).
• High-agency problem solving: you treat firewalls, isolated VPCs, and compliance tickets as solvable puzzles, not blockers.
• Commercial and organizational awareness: you read client dynamics, tell a support issue from an architectural gap, and spot expansion while troubleshooting.
• Consultative communication: you explain technical trade-offs cleanly to engineers and executives, and tie every technical point to business value.
• Willingness to travel 25 to 50% to customer sites.

How we work

Tetrate is a caring meritocracy: standing comes from what you deliver, not tenure or title. We dissent before decisions and commit after them. We practice radical candor — care personally, challenge directly. Excellence means outcome and rigor: a shipped outcome with no reproducible path is luck; a careful process with nothing shipped is theater. And we earn it hands-on: standing comes from what you build yourself, not from what you assign. The more senior you are, the more this applies, because seniority is the easiest place to stop touching the work. We hire, coach, and promote against these values.

Why Tetrate

• Expertise: eight years running tier 0 production infrastructure for regulated industries.
• Foundation: our data plane is Envoy — the standard already carrying the world’s AI traffic. When the largest AI companies on earth ship their inference through it, the debate about what the data plane should be is over. We are not just built on it; we are the top maintainers and co-created Envoy AI Gateway, so we help write the standard everyone else builds on.
• Product: set policy once in one place, then run gateways wherever the workload has to sit — on-prem, in-region, or at the edge — so ROI and data sovereignty stop being a tradeoff.