Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

You are a hands-on technical expert who partners with our most strategic customers to guide them through every phase of deploying and scaling Coder in production environments. You will act as the trusted technical authority who owns the entire customer journey from initial deployment through long-term adoption and optimization. Your primary responsibility is to ensure that complex customers achieve measurable business outcomes by leveraging Coder's platform capabilities effectively. You will translate customer requirements into robust deployment architectures and repeatable implementation patterns that drive long-term success. This role requires deep technical judgment, strategic thinking, and the ability to operate independently in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment. You will also synthesize insights from the field to directly influence product direction and platform evolution at Coder.

Key facts

What you'll do

Serve as the primary technical authority for post-sales customers, guiding deployment architecture, environment design, and adoption of Coder across both human and AI development workflows.

Own onboarding engagements end to end, ensuring customers move from contract to productive adoption with speed and confidence while minimizing friction and operational risk.

Lead Get Well engagements where architecture decisions, rollout patterns, or organizational dynamics are limiting customer health, adoption, or growth.

Help customers implement the technical and organizational changes required to adopt agentic development practices at scale, including governance, security, and operational controls.

Design and document repeatable delivery patterns across onboarding, architecture, and adoption that can scale across customer segments and reduce time to value.

Design and recommend reference architectures tailored to each customer's cloud environment, security posture, and organizational constraints, balancing flexibility with standardization.

Translate customer environment complexity into clear guidance on networking, ingress, identity, and infrastructure patterns that align with enterprise best practices.

Anticipate technical and operational risks, escalate to the right internal stakeholders, and track issues through to resolution while maintaining transparency with customer stakeholders.

Contribute to technical documentation, architecture guides, how-to resources, and statements of work that extend your impact across the broader customer base and enable scalability.

Capture structured product feedback from customer deployments and advocate directly with engineering and product teams for roadmap and usability improvements based on real-world usage.

Requirements

Bring 5 or more years of experience in a Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Architect, Platform Engineering, or equivalent post-sales technical role, with a demonstrated track record of guiding enterprise customers through complex technical deployments and adoption challenges.

Demonstrate proven hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud infrastructure on at least one major provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, and be able to discuss specific services, patterns, and tradeoffs with technical depth.

Show 2+ years of experience deploying or operating AI coding agents in a production or near-production environment, including understanding of agent execution loops, credential management, and governance and audit requirements in enterprise contexts.

Articulate the architectural difference between workspace-local agent tooling and a centralized agentic harness, and explain clearly why this distinction matters to security and compliance stakeholders.

Possess 2 or more years of production experience with Kubernetes, including cluster design, workload scheduling, networking, storage, and operational lifecycle management.

Have 2 or more years of experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling, and understand how enterprise teams structure, version, and maintain IaC at scale while managing collaboration and governance.

Demonstrate solid understanding of Linux systems administration, including networking fundamentals such as ingress controllers, proxies, load balancers, and DNS resolution in cloud-native environments.

Show familiarity with CI/CD pipeline design and DevOps practices, including how code moves from commit to running workload in enterprise contexts with appropriate controls and approvals.

Possess working knowledge of cloud security and identity, including IAM patterns, network segmentation, secrets management, and compliance-relevant controls that apply to modern software platforms.

Show understanding of observability practices including logging, metrics, and tracing across distributed systems, and how these practices apply to developer platform operations.

Demonstrate ability to design repeatable delivery patterns rather than solving only one-off problems, ensuring consistency and efficiency across multiple customer engagements.

Comfort working through organizational and workflow change alongside technical change, collaborating with stakeholders to drive adoption and process improvement.

Exhibit strong verbal and written communication skills, enabling effective dialogue with senior infrastructure teams and the production of clear, concise architecture documentation without switching contexts between roles.

Show high customer empathy, balancing technical ideals with practical constraints such as timeline, organizational maturity, and risk tolerance to deliver appropriate solutions.

Operate as a self-directed, analytically minded professional who is comfortable making decisions and taking ownership in a startup environment with limited direct supervision.

Practical notes

This role is required to sit in the Eastern Time Zone.

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