Solutions Engineer

Formal; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Job summary

Formal is seeking a Solutions Engineer to partner with customers, deeply understand their infrastructure, and guide deployments of the Formal platform. You will drive technical evaluations, design customized architectures, and collaborate with engineering to deliver ongoing value.

This hybrid role blends strong technical acumen with customer-facing empathy, enabling you to explain complex topics clearly and help teams adopt powerful data-security solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience in a solutions engineering, sales engineering, or implementation engineering role at a developer-facing company.
• Strong technical background—you've written production code, debugged systems, or run infrastructure.
• Ability to clearly explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and modern infrastructure tools.
• Comfort working across a variety of systems, APIs, and data protocols (Postgres, Kafka, MySQL, Snowflake, S3).
• A collaborative mindset and a high sense of ownership — you're proactive and love solving problems hands-on.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical point of contact for prospects and customers during onboarding, pilots, and expansions
• Lead deep technical conversations with engineering, security, and data teams at modern companies
• Design and deliver customized solution architectures that demonstrate the value of Formal's platform
• Work closely with engineering to prioritize and scope technical requests or integrations
• Build internal tooling, scripts, or resources to accelerate onboarding and repeatability
• Develop and maintain deep expertise in Formal’s product, data protocols, and adjacent ecosystem (e.g., Postgres, Kafka, S3, Snowflake)
• Gather feedback and relay customer insights to product and engineering to help shape the roadmad

Skills

Solutions engineering

Technical background

Communication skills

Cloud platforms

Data protocols

Tools

Postgres

Kafka

MySQL

Snowflake

S3

Temporal

Render

Job description

About Formal

Formal is data security platform designed to help teams understand and control their data on autopilot.

We're building a modern protocol-aware reverse-proxy for datastores and APIs that helps organizations understand their data in real-time. This allows teams to see how sensitive data is stored, consumed, and used in order to enforce least privilege through masking, filtering, or anonymization policies.

We are trusted by leading companies such as Ramp, Gusto, Notion to solve problems across data security and compliance, data quality management, and infrastructure access.

Formal is backed by top-tiers VCs including Thrive Capital and Y Combinator with angel investors that include executives and founders from Datadog, Clickhouse, Plaid, and Vanta.

About the Role

Formal is on a mission to build the best engineering team and we're looking for people who want to make outsized impact on shaping the product and building the company.

We're looking for a Solutions Engineer who will partner closely with our customers and prospects to deeply understand their infrastructure and workflows, guide technical evaluations, and ensure successful deployments and ongoing value.

This is a hybrid role that blends strong technical acumen with customer-facing empathy. You'll collaborate with engineering, product, and GTM teams to solve complex customer problems and influence the roadmap based on real-world needs.

If you're someone who loves diving into technical architecture, explaining complex topics clearly, and helping teams adopt powerful products, this role is for you.

What you'll do

• Act as the technical point of contact for prospects and customers during onboarding, pilots, and expansions
• Lead deep technical conversations with engineering, security, and data teams at modern companies
• Design and deliver customized solution architectures that demonstrate the value of Formal's platform
• Work closely with engineering to prioritize and scope technical requests or integrations
• Build internal tooling, scripts, or resources to accelerate onboarding and repeatability
• Develop and maintain deep expertise in Formal’s product, data protocols, and adjacent ecosystem (e.g., Postgres, Kafka, S3, Snowflake)
• Gather feedback and relay customer insights to product and engineering to help shape the roadmad

What You Need

• Experience in a solutions engineering, sales engineering, or implementation engineering role at a developer-facing company
• Strong technical background — you've written production code, debugged systems, or run infrastructure before
• Ability to clearly explain complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and modern infrastructure tools
• Comfort working across a variety of systems, APIs, and data protocols (e.g., Postgres, Kafka, MySQL, Snowflake, S3)
• A collaborative mindset and a high sense of ownership — you're proactive and love solving problems hands-on
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Nice-to-Haves

• You have worked in a fast, high-growth startup environment before
• You have experience using tools like Temporal and Render
• You have extensive knowledge of datastore protocols (Postgres, S3, Kafka)

Compensation

• This role offers cash compensation and a stock options grant.
• The positioning of offers within a certain range depends on various factors, including: candidate experience, qualifications, skills, and business requirements.

Benefits (for U.S.-based full-time employees)

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you
  • Partially covered for your dependents
• Flexible PTO