Forward Deployed Engineer

Smallstep
United States
Workplace: RemoteFull timeUSD 185,000 - 230,000 annuallyFunction: Solutions Engineering & Sales EngineeringSkills: ["Problem-solving","Independent work","Service mindset","Customer empathy","Technical escalation"]

Embed with customers deploying Smallstep’s device identity platform and guide implementations to production. Diagnose deployment failures, act as the technical escalation point for account and customer success teams, and ship production Golang fixes. Build PoC environments using Bash and Terraform, maintain proof-based runbooks, and carry an on-call rotation with defined SLAs. Work across customer endpoint fleets, IdPs, and Smallstep certificate authority services.

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FursaFursa
Smallstep
Smallstep
1 day ago

Forward Deployed Engineer

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 17 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Embed with customers deploying Smallstep’s device identity platform and guide implementations to production. Diagnose deployment failures, act as the technical escalation point for account and customer success teams, and ship production Golang fixes. Build PoC environments using Bash and Terraform, maintain proof-based runbooks, and carry an on-call rotation with defined SLAs. Work across customer endpoint fleets, IdPs, and Smallstep certificate authority services.
Location: United States
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Solutions Engineering & Sales Engineering

Key Responsibilities

  • •Diagnose and resolve technical failures blocking customer deployments.
  • •Serve as the technical escalation point for Technical Account Managers and Customer Success Engineers when deeper engineering involvement is needed.
  • •Ship production Golang code to resolve root causes discovered during deployment debugging.
  • •Build PoC environments, runbooks, and automation using Bash and Terraform for new product surfaces.
  • •Carry a formal on-call rotation with defined SLAs and set day-to-day priorities for deployment ops engineers.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 185,000 - 230,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •Debugging distributed, multi-service cloud architectures in live customer environments.
  • •Troubleshooting TLS/mTLS at the protocol level, including certificate chain validation, trust stores, and handshake failures.
  • •Production experience with certificate-based authentication and enterprise access methods (VPNs, enterprise Wi‑Fi/EAP‑TLS, RADIUS, SSH, OAuth).
  • •Developing and shipping production Golang code.
  • •Owning technical escalations directly with customers in partnership with account teams.
Experience:Distributed systemsCloudCustomer-facing technical rolesSecurityPKI
Skills:Problem-solvingIndependent workService mindsetCustomer empathyTechnical escalation
Tech Stack:GolangBashTerraformGitGitHub ActionsSCEPACMESCIMMTLSEAP-TLSRADIUSPKIX.509SSHTPMsMacOSWindowsLinuxChromeOSMDM

Company Brief

Smallstep
Provides developer-first identity and certificate management solutions, including an open-source PKI (step-ca) and enterprise offerings to automate TLS, mTLS, and SSH provisioning across cloud-native and hybrid environments.
Industry: Cybersecurity
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Growth Stage Startup
Headquarters: Seattle, United States
Founded: 2016
WebsiteLinkedIn