Strategic Forward Deployed Engineer for AI Cloud

FDE Times; Oregon; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4 weeks paid vacation

Parental leave (14+ weeks)

Health insurance

401K plans

Job summary

Render is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with strategic customers, providing a concierge-level technical partnership that blends architecture work with onboarding for high-growth startups.

You will own Postgres expertise, drive migrations, and collaborate with account teams to turn technical wins into revenue, shaping the program and playbooks for scaling this role.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals; write production-quality code and work hands-on-keyboard inside a customer's codebase.
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure: containers, CI/CD, networking, autoscaling, and running real workloads in production.
• Deep Postgres and database expertise: schema design, performance tuning, replication, and production data migrations.
• AI fluency: you work with AI tools daily to accelerate delivery and understand LLM architectures.
• Excellent communication with diverse stakeholders, including executives.
• Self-directed and comfortable with ambiguity; you can stand up a new function without an existing playbook.
• Commercial instincts: you understand how technical wins connect to expansion, renewal, and revenue.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts: turn major credit grants into durable production adoption, surface expansion signals, and partner with the account team to convert them into revenue.
• Own the ongoing technical relationship for accounts: architecture and health reviews, roadmap sessions, incident follow-up and RCA, and escalation for hard problems.
• Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures.
• Act as a high-signal feedback channel to product and engineering.
• Partner with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure smooth handoffs and long-term coverage.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Postgres expertise

AI fluency

Communication

Self-directed

Commercial instincts

Job description

Render is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with strategic customers, providing a concierge-level technical partnership that blends architecture work with onboarding for high-growth startups.

You will own Postgres expertise, drive migrations, and collaborate with account teams to turn technical wins into revenue, shaping the program and playbooks for scaling this role.