Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Coder; United States; On-site; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Coder is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to join the Customer Solutions team. In this role, you will be the principal technical authority, guiding complex customer deployments and promoting the adoption of innovative development workflows.

The ideal candidate will possess over 5 years of experience and demonstrate a proven ability to advise on deployment architecture and technical practices.

If you thrive in dynamic settings and are passionate about customer success, we would love to hear from you.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a Forward Deployed Engineering or equivalent role guiding enterprise customers.
• Hands-on experience in designing and deploying cloud infrastructure.
• 2+ years of production experience with Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical authority for post-sales customers.
• Own onboarding engagements ensuring customers move to productive adoption.
• Lead engagements to improve customer health or growth.

Skills

Cloud infrastructure design and deployment

Kubernetes expertise

Terraform proficiency

Linux systems administration

CI/CD pipeline knowledge

AI tooling experience

Strong communication skills

Customer empathy

Self-directed and analytical

Education

5+ years in a relevant technical role

Tools

AWS

Google Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Docker

Job description

We are looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to join the Customer Solutions team. You will be the technical authority embedded with our most complex customers, guiding them through deployment, architecture, onboarding, and the adoption of agentic development workflows. You bring deep hands‑on experience from prior roles and use that depth to advise, design repeatable patterns, and drive customer outcomes end to end. You operate autonomously, own the technical success of your customers, and bring their experience back to shape how Coder builds and delivers.

This is not an execution‑only role. You are equally comfortable doing deep technical work with a customer and stepping back to design the repeatable pattern behind it. You are energized by ambiguity, motivated by customer outcomes, and capable of influencing organizational change alongside the technical work.

What you’ll do here

• Serve as the primary technical authority for post‑sales customers, guiding deployment architecture, environment design, and adoption of Coder across both human and AI development workflows
• Own onboarding engagements end‑to‑end, ensuring customers move from contract to productive adoption with speed and confidence
• Lead engagements where architecture decisions, rollout patterns, or organizational dynamics are limiting customer health or growth
• Help customers implement the technical and organizational changes required to adopt agentic development practices at scale
• Design and document repeatable delivery patterns across onboarding, architecture, and adoption that can scale across customer segments
• Design and recommend reference architectures tailored to each customer’s cloud environment, security posture, and organizational constraints
• Translate customer environment complexity into clear guidance on networking, ingress, identity, and infrastructure patterns
• Anticipate technical and operational risks, elevate to the right internal stakeholders, and track issues through to resolution
• Contribute to technical documentation, architecture guides, how‑to resources, and statements of work that extend your impact across the customer base
• Capture structured product feedback from customer deployments and advocate directly with engineering and product teams for roadmap and usability improvements

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of experience in a Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Architect, Platform Engineering, or equivalent post‑sales technical role, with a demonstrated track record of guiding enterprise customers through complex technical deployments
• Proven hands‑on experience from a prior role designing and deploying cloud infrastructure on at least one major provider: AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure; you have done the work and can speak to it with specificity
• 2+ years of production experience with Kubernetes: cluster design, workload scheduling, networking, storage, and operational lifecycle
• 2+ years of experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure‑as‑code tooling; you understand how enterprise teams structure, version, and maintain IaC at scale
• Solid understanding of Linux systems administration, including networking fundamentals: ingress controllers, proxies, load balancers, and DNS resolution in cloud‑native environments
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline design and DevOps practices; you understand how code moves from commit to running workload in an enterprise context
• Working knowledge of cloud security and identity: IAM patterns, network segmentation, secrets management, and compliance‑relevant controls
• Understanding of observability practices including logging, metrics, and tracing across distributed systems
• Experience with AI tooling at both the user level (coding agents, assistants) and infrastructure level (model proxies, LLM routing layers such as LiteLLM)
• Demonstrated ability to design repeatable delivery patterns, not just solve one‑off problems
• Comfort working through organizational and workflow change alongside technical change with customers
• Strong verbal and written communication skills: you can hold a room with a senior infrastructure team and produce a clear architecture document without those being separate skills
• High customer empathy: you understand that the best technical solution does not always fit a customer’s constraints, timeline, or organizational reality
• Self‑directed, analytically minded, and comfortable operating with full autonomy in a startup environment

Bonus

• Experience at both early‑stage startups and larger software organizations
• Background as a Software Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Platform Engineer before moving into a customer‑facing role
• Familiarity with regulated environments: air‑gapped deployments, network isolation, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or DORA requirements
• Experience with disaster recovery design and multi‑region availability patterns
• Cloud cost optimization experience, including rightsizing, reserved capacity, and FinOps practices
• Experience with Tailscale or similar overlay networking tools
• Kubernetes certification (CKA, CKAD, or CKS)
• Open‑source contributions
• Experience with Backstage.io or similar internal developer portals and platform tooling
• Prior work on or alongside a developer platform or platform engineering team
• Experience introducing new operating models or delivery patterns across post‑sales or go‑to‑market teams

Equal Opportunity Employer

Coder is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to qualified applicants and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, pregnancy, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.