Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

You will act as the technical conscience of the sales team, embedding directly into customer environments to validate architecture and de risk deployment strategies. Your day to day will involve deeply understanding complex enterprise security postures so you can translate ambiguous requirements into clear implementation plans. You will own the technical relationship with key accounts, becoming a trusted advisor who guides strategic decisions about identity and access management. This role requires you to build creative solutions under constraints, challenging assumptions while maintaining a high degree of empathy for customer workflows. You will be responsible for turning abstract product capabilities into concrete proof that Opal can deliver value in specific contexts. Collaboration will be constant, as you work alongside sales, product, and engineering to ensure alignment between promise and delivery. You will document your findings and patterns rigorously, ensuring that every engagement contributes to the collective intelligence of the company. Ultimately, you will be the person who ensures that critical deployments not only succeed technically but also reinforce trust in the Opal brand.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead technical discovery sessions and stakeholder interviews to uncover hidden requirements and constraints before a deployment ever begins.
• Design and prototype custom integrations that connect Opal with existing identity platforms, APIs, and legacy infrastructure in customer environments.
• Translate complex security concepts into clear narratives that help non-technical executives understand risk, tradeoffs, and ROI.
• Troubleshoot live customer environments, diagnosing configuration drift, permission anomalies, and integration failures in real time.
• Write production grade code for proof of concept projects, ensuring that temporary solutions are robust, observable, and maintainable.
• Capture detailed notes from implementation work and synthesize recurring themes into actionable insights for the product team.
• Partner with engineering to turn one off implementations into scalable features that benefit the entire customer base.
• Own the end to end delivery of technical milestones, coordinating with sales to ensure alignment between roadmap promises and on the ground execution.
• Represent Opal in architectural review meetings, providing authoritative guidance on identity governance patterns and best practices.
• Document deployment playbooks, runbooks, and decision logs to enable consistent execution across new and existing customers.
• Analyze customer workflows to identify automation opportunities that reduce manual overhead and improve adoption.
• Provide clear, audience appropriate communication to technical teams, security leadership, and executive sponsors throughout engagements.
• Maintain a sharp technical edge by exploring emerging standards in identity, authorization, and AI driven access management.
• Escalate and resolve high impact issues collaboratively, ensuring that customers view Opal as a partner in their success.

Requirements

You must have a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a closely related technical field. You bring a minimum of five years of professional experience in software engineering, systems integration, or technical account management. You have demonstrated ability writing production grade code in at least one modern programming language such as Python, JavaScript, or Go. You are comfortable working with distributed systems, APIs, and infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or similar provisioning platforms. You have experience interfacing directly with enterprise technology stakeholders, including C level executives, security architects, and engineering managers. You understand identity and access management concepts including authentication, authorization, RBAC, ABAC, and federation protocols. You have a strong grasp of cloud platforms, particularly AWS, Azure, or GCP, and familiarity with deployment pipelines and monitoring practices. You are disciplined about writing clean, testable code and you value debugging as much as feature development. You communicate with precision and empathy, adjusting your style based on audience and context.

Nice to have

Experience with security tooling, SIEM platforms, or governance workflows is a strong advantage. Background in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or critical infrastructure is preferred. Familiarity with AI and machine learning concepts related to access management is a growing area of interest.

Practical notes

This role is based in San Francisco and requires in person presence in the office during standard business hours. Occasional travel may be required to meet with customers or participate in company events. Employment is full time and eligible for standard benefits as outlined. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the role is filled.