About the role
We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer with 3–6 years of experience to own the full technical lifecycle of Openlayer's enterprise customers — from on-prem deployment and configuration to ongoing maintenance and expansion. You're a rare hybrid: a real engineer who's equally at home debugging a Helm chart and running a working session with a CISO, and you're energized by the messiness of complex enterprise environments, not intimidated by it.
What will you be doing?
- Take over enterprise on-prem and cloud deployments from the CTO — walking customers through architecture, standing up Openlayer on their infrastructure, and configuring SAML/SSO, SCIM, and cloud environments end-to-end
- Own accounts post-deployment: maintain live environments, resolve integration issues, and ship code changes (bug fixes, config updates, small features) autonomously without waiting on core engineering
- Help customers onboard their AI use cases into Openlayer — understanding their LLM pipelines, RAG systems, or agent workflows and implementing evaluation and monitoring that fits their stack
- Act as the trusted technical partner for enterprise engineering teams — the person they call when something breaks, and the reason they stay and expand
- Turn field learnings into reusable playbooks, reference architectures, and integration templates that make every future deployment faster
Key Requirements
- Has explicitly done this role before — FDE, Solutions Engineer, or Customer Success Engineer at a B2B SaaS or AI/ML company; pure SWEs with no customer-facing experience will not be considered
- Hands-on experience with enterprise infrastructure deployments: Kubernetes, Docker, Helm charts, and at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Comfortable working in terminal, writing bash/shell scripts, and shipping production code (Python and/or TypeScript) to unblock customer environments autonomously
- Strong communicator who can hold credibility with opinionated enterprise engineering teams — patient, thick-skinned, and trusted by engineers because they are an engineer
- Based in the US (preferred) or Western Europe/India for timezone coverage; role is fully remote
About Openlayer
Openlayer is a Series A AI governance and observability platform purpose-built for large enterprises navigating the complexities of deploying AI at scale. The company's mission is to give organizations the technical controls they need to evaluate, monitor, and deploy AI systems safely — serving as a control plane for AI that bridges governance teams and technical enforcement. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, Openlayer is backed by Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, and notable angels including the founders of Instacart, Instagram, and Vercel — having raised $19.3M to date, including a $14.5M Series A in May 2025. The platform delivers 100+ automated tests, real-time guardrails against prompt injections, PII leakage, bias, toxicity, and hallucinations, and full traceability across RAG pipelines, agents, and complex multi-step AI workflows — supporting compliance with frameworks including NIST, ISO 42001, and the EU AI Act. Customers are primarily Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 organizations with over $1B in annual revenue operating in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and telecom. At just ~25 people, Openlayer operates with a strong ownership mentality and a hands-on founding team — the CTO personally manages enterprise on-prem deployments — reflecting a culture that prizes deep technical craft, customer obsession, speed, and building things that work in the real world.
Required skills
Other roles at Openlayer
Job details
Salary
$170,000 - $240,000
Equity
0.2% - 0.3%
Location
Remote
Experience
3+ years
Funding
Total raised
$19.4M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.