Forward Deployed Engineer, Cybersecurity (San Francisco)

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

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**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