Customer-Facing Software Engineer

Namespace; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and stock options

Flexible working hours

Market-leading parental leave

Job summary

Namespace is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with customer engineering teams, addressing their infrastructure and workflow challenges. This role requires strong technical skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex systems across various environments.

Ideal candidates will be driven, curious, and skilled in communication, capable of navigating ambiguous situations. The position offers a competitive salary range of $150K - $220K and emphasizes flexibility and ownership.

Qualifications

• Ability to navigate unfamiliar systems quickly.
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• Customer-oriented mindset with a strong sense of ownership.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand their workflows.
• Drive issues and improvements opportunities.
• Reverse engineer customer systems and resolve complex technical challenges.
• Build product improvements and tooling.

Skills

Strong engineering fundamentals

Comfort debugging across modern infrastructure

High curiosity and systematic problem-solving

Strong communication skills

Customer-oriented mindset

Job description

Overview

Join our mission. We\'re proud to work with many incredible companies, accelerating their ability to build their products. We\'ve spent years watching talented engineering teams lose momentum to the same frustrating bottleneck: waiting for CI to finish. Waiting for builds to complete. Waiting for tests to run.

After experiencing this pain firsthand at companies of every size, we set out to build the developer infrastructure platform we\'d always wanted to use. Something that would seamlessly integrate with our workflows and the tools teams already love—but make everything dramatically faster and more cost-effective. Today, we\'re already accelerating hundreds of companies around the world, helping them ship features instead of waiting for infrastructure. We\'ve built something that feels almost magical in its simplicity: change your runs-on line, mount your toolchain cache directory and suddenly your builds are 5x faster.

About The Role

At Namespace, Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with customer engineering teams to solve complex infrastructure and developer workflow challenges. You\'ll serve as a technical partner and trusted advisor to customers, embedding within a wide variety of engineering organizations to understand how they build and ship software and help them improve, scale, and modernize those workflows. As an extension of our customers\' engineering teams, you\'ll navigate complex systems, troubleshoot technical issues, and translate real-world challenges into product and platform improvements.

This is a highly technical, highly autonomous, and customer-facing role. You\'ll work across CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, build systems, and application environments, often requiring you to quickly understand unfamiliar technologies and workflows. Success depends on your ability to rapidly develop an understanding of complex systems, uncover high-leverage opportunities for improvement, and drive both tactical fixes and longer-term engineering outcomes. You\'ll work with a global customer base across the US, EU, Asia and Australia – primarily async via Slack and email, with on-site visits being the exception rather than the norm.

Our culture

We\'re looking for people with grit—people who push through ambiguity, take ownership, and keep going when things get hard. You\'re deeply curious, driven to understand how things work and how they can be improved. Most importantly, you have a strong bias to execution: you don\'t wait for perfect conditions, you ship, learn, and iterate quickly. If you care about building, moving fast, and making real impact, you\'ll fit right in.

What You’ll Do

• Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, infrastructure setups, operational and technical challenges
• Quickly develop an understanding of new technical environments and independently drive issues and improvements opportunities from investigation through resolution
• Reverse engineer customer systems and resolve issues spanning CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, build systems, and application environments
• Act as an extension of our customers\' engineering teams, helping them solve complex technical challenges and improve how they build and ship software
• Build product improvements, tooling, integrations, and fixes that unblock customer teams, improve developer productivity, and streamline software delivery workflows
• Identify recurring patterns across customer engagements and collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate them into platform improvements
• Drive adoption through deep technical partnership, helping customers expand Namespace across additional workflows, teams, and infrastructure use cases
• Develop deep expertise in modern developer workflows, infrastructure systems, and software delivery practices

What We’re Looking For

• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to navigate unfamiliar systems quickly
• Comfort debugging across modern infrastructure, developer tooling, and application environments
• High curiosity and a systematic approach to problem-solving
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work directly with technical teams and users
• Bias toward execution and comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Customer-oriented mindset with a strong sense of ownership and urgency

You can expect:

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Flexible working hours
• Market-leading parental leave

Life at Namespace Labs:

• We pride ourselves in being a small team of experts that can achieve a lot.
• We balance our long-term vision with short-term pragmatism.
• We believe in being fully transparent internally on how decisions are made, on how the company is doing, and we use that information to drive our decisions.

Compensation Range: $150K - $220K