Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Render is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with strategic customers, providing concierge‑level technical partnership and leading onboarding intensives for high‑growth AI startups.

Key responsibilities

• Act as the dedicated technical partner for top accounts, delivering architecture reviews, migration planning, and hands‑on implementation.
• Run scoped onboarding intensives, from intake and success criteria to hands‑on execution.
• Lead database engagements, focusing on Postgres architecture, performance tuning, and complex migrations from Heroku, AWS, and other clouds.
• Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts, turning credit grants into production adoption and surfacing expansion signals.
• Own the ongoing technical relationship, providing proactive health reviews, roadmap sessions, incident follow‑up, and escalation support.
• Build the Forward Deployed Engineer playbook, including qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures.
• Provide high‑signal feedback to product and engineering teams.

Required profile

• 8+ years in a hands‑on, customer‑facing engineering role (solutions, professional services, etc.).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to write production‑quality code.
• Self‑directed, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to stand up a new function without an existing playbook.
• Excellent communication skills with stakeholders ranging from founders to enterprise platform teams.

Required skills

• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure: containers, CI/CD, networking, autoscaling, and production workloads.
• Advanced Postgres knowledge: schema design, performance tuning, replication, and data migrations.
• Fluency with AI/LLM tools and architectures.

What we offer

• 4 weeks paid vacation and 14 weeks fully paid parental leave.
• Comprehensive health, dental, vision coverage (100% employer‑paid for employee, 99% for dependents).
• Long‑term disability, life insurance, 401(k) plan.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend, cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Bay Area employees and home‑office stipend for remote staff.
• Continuous learning benefits and support.