Forward Deployed Engineer — AI Agents

Forward Deployed Engineer — AI Agents

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to join Robusta, where you'll ship production code for our AI agents and work directly with the enterprise customers who deploy them. You'll report directly to our CTO and spend 50% of your time coding, 50% with customers.

Why This Role Is Different?

Most engineering roles keep you far from the people using your code. This one puts you in the room with teams at some of the largest companies in the world — listening to them on calls and shipping improvements within 24 hours.

You'll use AI coding tools like Claude Code as a force multiplier — shipping features in hours that would normally take weeks. But shipping fast isn't sufficient. You need to deeply understand and improve our architecture so that every feature you ship makes the next one easier to build, not harder.

You'll be the right hand of our CTO as he closes contracts with the largest companies in the world, and share feedback directly with our product team to shape the product roadmap based on what you're hearing from customers. This is an intense role — but for the right person, it will be a learning opportunity like nothing else in your career.

What You'll Do?

• Half your time with customers — join calls, run technical onboarding and POCs, understand their Kubernetes and cloud environments, alert pipelines, and tooling
• Half your time writing code — build and ship features, integrations, and any feature that will benefit our customers — whether it's frontend, backend, or any other subsystem. With aggressive use of coding agents, anything is rapidly deliverable
• Be the voice of our customers internally — represent what customers actually need in product discussions, turn patterns you see across accounts into roadmap input, and help our product team gather feedback from the customers you work with
• Ruthlessly prioritize — we don't build everything. You'll identify which customer feedback will move the needle for this customer and others, and bring in the engineering team when an initiative needs more hands — speccing out requirements and making sure that whatever we build thrills the customers you work with and meets their needs
• Turn one-off customer requests into generalizable platform capabilities that benefit everyone

What We're Looking For:

• At least 7 years of backend engineering experience building complex systems and navigating architectural tradeoffs
• Kubernetes experience
• Willingness to work directly with customers — prior customer-facing experience is a plus, not a requirement
• Architectural judgment — you know when to build the abstraction and when to ship the simple thing
• Bonus: experience with LLMs in production (tool calling, context management, multi-provider)
• Bonus: background in SRE, platform engineering, or observability tooling
• Bonus: open-source contributions, especially in the CNCF ecosystem

The engineering skills are non-negotiable — but for the right person, we believe that customer-facing skills can be taught, and our senior team will actively mentor you on this. If you're a strong engineer and this role excites you, reach out even if you don't check every box.

About Us

Robusta is behind HolmesGPT, a popular open-source AI troubleshooting tool now in the CNCF. Our software runs at scale in some of the largest companies in the world. Our engineers work directly with customers — shaping solutions, validating ideas with real users, and seeing the impact of their work immediately.

We ship fast. Really fast. At a speed that makes some people uncomfortable. Every engineer ships to production on their first day. To do that sustainably, we've made major investments in automated testing, end-to-end verification, and the tooling that lets us move quickly without breaking things.

Interested?

This is not a typical engineering role. For the right person, it's a massive career leap — the kind of experience that prepares you to found your own company, move into product or leadership, or become the rare engineer who's just as good at understanding the business as the technology. If that's you — or someone you know — reach out to us directly.