Senior Enterprise AI Forward-Deployed Engineer

Madrona Venture Labs; United States; On-site; USD 216,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Stacklok is hiring a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to lead hands-on engagements with enterprise customers across the US-East and EMEA. You will embed with customers, drive production deployments, and answer tough technical questions, while shaping deployment patterns and technical direction for the broader team.

You will mentor engineers, define reference architectures, and contribute to the product roadmap with field insights.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production code quality and testing.
• Extensive experience leading enterprise customer delivery in the field.
• Proven technical leadership and mentorship in engineering practices.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise including cluster architecture, networking, RBAC, and operator/CRD literacy.
• Observability across metrics, logs, and traces with tooling like Prometheus/OpenTelemetry/Datadog/Grafana.
• Hands-on experience with MCP servers or AI agent tooling in production.
• AI-first mindset and ability to apply AI to accelerate delivery.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for technical/non-technical audiences.
• Startup mentality with strong ownership and action-oriented work style.

Responsibilities

• Lead forward deployed engagements end to end, from scoping goals to production deployment.
• Own regional technical calls as in-region anchor for platform and Kubernetes issues.
• Design changes to platform deployment to Kubernetes and contribute upstream.
• Define reusable reference architectures and deployment patterns for engagements.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and establish hiring standards.
• Shape regional engagement model, runbooks, and deployment standards.
• Channel field insight into product roadmap and AI-assisted practices.

Skills

Software engineering

Senior engineer

Leadership

Kubernetes

Telemetry & observability

Tools

Go controllers

Helm

Flux

ArgoCD

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Grafana

Job description

Stacklok is hiring a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to lead hands-on engagements with enterprise customers across the US-East and EMEA. You will embed with customers, drive production deployments, and answer tough technical questions, while shaping deployment patterns and technical direction for the broader team.

You will mentor engineers, define reference architectures, and contribute to the product roadmap with field insights.