Forward Deployed Engineer

Webhosting; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Render is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with strategic customers. The role blends concierge technical partnership with onboarding at scale, defining playbooks and scaling the model across high-growth accounts.

You’ll own architecture reviews, migrations, data challenges, and proactive account health, while partnering with Account Managers to ensure durable, long-term coverage and strong customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with top accounts as their dedicated technical partner, providing concierge service on architecture reviews and migrations.
• Run scoped onboarding intensives for high-growth startups from intake to hands-on execution.
• Lead the database side of customer engagements, including Postgres architecture, performance tuning, and migrations.
• Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts, turning credits into durable production adoption.
• Own ongoing technical relationships with accounts: architecture reviews, roadmap sessions, incident follow-up and RCA.
• Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, templates, and reference architectures.
• Provide high-signal feedback to product and engineering translating customer friction into product input.
• Partner with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure smooth handoffs and lasting coverage.

Job description

Job Description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms-so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.

Unlike complex hyperscalers or epoxy edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you’re building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.

Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive-designed for the speed of modern AI development.

We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.

Applying to Render

We’re seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.

We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.

Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.

About the Role

We are looking for Render’s first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands‑on with our most strategic customers. Our largest contracts and fastest-growing AI startups are scaling on Render, and this role provides them with a dedicated, concierge‑level technical partnership. You will balance two motions: white‑glove engagement with our top accounts, where you work closely with the customer’s engineering team as a trusted technical partner, and scoped onboarding intensives that get high‑growth startups confidently building on the platform. As the first FDE in our Field Engineering organization, you will define the playbook for this function, prove the model, and shape how it scales.

What You’ll Do

Work closely with Render’s top accounts as their dedicated technical partner, providing concierge service across architecture reviews, migration planning, and hands‑on‑delivery.

Run scoped onboarding intensives for high‑growth startups, from intake and success criteria through hands‑on‑keyboard execution.

Lead the database side of customer engagements, including Postgres architecture, performance tuning, and complex data migrations from Heroku, AWS, and other cloud providers.

Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts: turn major credit grants into durable production adoption, surface expansion signals from your technical work, and partner with the account team to convert them into revenue.

Own the ongoing technical relationship for your accounts: proactive architecture and health reviews, collaborative roadmap sessions, incident follow‑up and RCA, and escalation point for hard technical problems, working closely with the account team.

Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures that make the program repeatable.

Act as a high‑signal feedback channel to product and engineering, translating customer friction into prioritized product input.

Partner with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure smooth handoffs after each engagement and durable long‑term coverage.

Nice‑to‑Haves

If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you-your unique experience might be just what we need.

This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship. At Render’s discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.

Render is an equal‑opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy‑related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.