Forward Deployed Engineer, Cybersecurity

About the role

On-site (San Francisco, CA) · $170K–$250K · 2 openings \

About the company

A fast-growing, YC-backed cybersecurity startup building an AI-powered platform that detects and stops account takeover attacks for small and mid-sized businesses.

The product has found strong product-market fit fast, already protects over a million users across thousands of businesses, and wins the large majority of its head-to-head competitive evaluations.

The founding team combines experience from established security and quant firms. \The role You'll be the first line of defense for the company's highest-value customers, owning the full cycle from triaging bugs and shipping fixes to building real technical rapport with customers.

This role splits roughly 60/40 between hands-on coding and direct customer-facing work — you're expected to genuinely do both, not lean on one side while the other slides. \What you'll do\

Serve as the primary point of contact for the company's largest accounts, handling every inbound question, bug report, and feature request

Turn around bug fixes and incremental product improvements quickly while embedded with high-value customers

Work closely with the engineering team to deeply understand the product and its technical constraints, so you can speak credibly with customers

Lead initial product discovery for new features based on real customer pain points, then help roll improvements back into the codebase

Represent the company's technical capabilities externally, including at trade shows and technical demos, alongside the go-to-market team

\What you must bring\

Experience building 0-to-1 — you've founded a company, or been an early engineer at a startup building something genuinely new

A CS degree or closely related technical degree from a strong program

Demonstrated ability to write and ship real production code

2–5 years of experience in full-stack engineering (TypeScript, Python) with direct, hands-on customer interaction

Experience shipping bug fixes and iterative improvements directly from customer feedback

Real customer-facing technical experience — you've engaged directly with customers to discover pain points and build solutions, not just handled support or configuration tickets

The instinct to identify problems and ship solutions independently, without waiting to be told

Available for up to 25% travel (trade shows, client embeds)

\Nice to have\

Prior forward-deployed engineering experience at a high-growth startup

For candidates from a consulting or investment banking background: a CS degree plus demonstrable, shipped code (side projects, GitHub activity, or SWE internships)

\Compensation & logistics\

$170K–$250K base salary plus 0.08%–0.2% equity

Benefits include healthcare, dental, vision, 401(k), daily lunch and dinner, a commuting stipend, an Equinox discount, and relocation support

On-site five days a week in San Francisco, CA

2 openings

Not open to visa sponsorship — candidates must already be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship

\This isn't the right fit if\

Your background is only at large enterprises, with no startup or high-autonomy experience

Your work history shows no stint longer than a year

You're looking for a role that's mostly one side of the job — pure engineering with no customer contact, or pure customer-facing work with no hands-on coding