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Forward Deployed Engineer

Render· Sales Organization
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SF or Remote (US/Canada)$236k - $289kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

First Forward Deployed Engineer at Render, providing concierge-level technical partnership to strategic customers, blending hands-on delivery with scalable playbooks and an emphasis on Postgres/database expertise, AI fluency, and deep customer communication.

Responsibilities

  • Work closely with Render's top accounts as their dedicated technical partner, providing concierge service across architecture reviews, migration planning, and hands-on delivery.
  • Run scoped onboarding intensives for high-growth startups, from intake and success criteria through hands-on-keyboard execution.
  • Lead the database side of customer engagements, including Postgres architecture, performance tuning, and complex data migrations from Heroku, AWS, and other cloud providers.
  • Drive activation and expansion in strategic accounts: turn major credit grants into durable production adoption, surface expansion signals from your technical work, and partner with the account team to convert them into revenue.
  • Own the ongoing technical relationship for your accounts: proactive architecture and health reviews, collaborative roadmap sessions, incident follow-up and RCA, and escalation point for hard technical problems, working closely with the account team.
  • Build the FDE playbook: qualification criteria, engagement templates, success metrics, and reference architectures that make the program repeatable.
  • Act as a high-signal feedback channel to product and engineering, translating customer friction into prioritized product input.
  • Partner with Account Managers and Customer Engineers to ensure smooth handoffs after each engagement and durable long-term coverage.

Qualifications

  • 8+ years in a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role: forward deployed, solutions, customer, or professional services engineering.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals; you can write production-quality code and work hands-on-keyboard inside a customer's codebase.
  • Deep experience with cloud infrastructure: containers, CI/CD, networking, autoscaling, and running real workloads in production.
  • Deep Postgres and database expertise: schema design, performance tuning, replication, and production data migrations. Our largest engagements consistently turn on this skill set.
  • AI fluency: you work with AI tools daily to accelerate your own delivery, and you understand LLM application architectures well enough to guide the teams building them.
  • Excellent communication with everyone from startup founders to enterprise platform teams, including executive-level conversations.
  • Self-directed and comfortable with ambiguity; you can stand up a new function without an existing playbook.
  • Commercial instincts: you understand how technical wins connect to expansion, renewal, and revenue.

Skills

Required:PostgreSQLCloud infrastructureProduction-quality software developmentAI/LLM fluencyCommunication

Benefits

  • 4 weeks of paid vacation.
  • 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
  • Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
  • 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
  • Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
  • Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
  • Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
  • Continuous learning benefits & related support.
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Render

Your fastest path to production

On Render, you can build, deploy, and scale your apps with unparalleled ease – from your first user to your billionth.

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