The opportunity
We are looking for Render's first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with our most strategic customers. Our largest contracts and fastest-growing AI startups are scaling on Render, and this role provides them with a dedicated, concierge-level technical partnership.
What you'll do
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 from Heroku, AWS, and other cloud providers.
Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts: turn major credit grants into durable production adoption, surface expansion signals from your technical work, and partner with the account team to convert them into revenue.
Own the ongoing technical relationship for your accounts: proactive architecture and health reviews, collaborative roadmap sessions, incident follow-up and RCA, and escalation point for hard technical problems, working closely with the account team.
Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures that make the program repeatable.
What they're looking for
- + years in a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role: forward deployed, solutions, customer, or professional services engineering.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals; you can 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. Our largest engagements consistently turn on this skill set.
- AI fluency: you work with AI tools daily to accelerate your own delivery, and: you understand LLM application architectures well enough to guide the teams building them.
- Excellent communication with everyone from startup founders to enterprise: platform teams, including executive-level conversations.
- 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.
