Forward Deployed Engineer

Description:

Qodo is building the AI code review and governance platform for the world's most ambitious engineering organizations. Our customers are shipping AI-generated code at a pace that breaks every assumption built into traditional code review, static analysis, and SDLC tooling. They turn to Qodo to keep quality, security, and governance from becoming the bottleneck.

Forward Deployed Engineering sits at the frontier of that work. We embed with Qodo's most strategic enterprise customers, running on-prem, air-gapped, and heavily regulated environments, and own the technical arc from discovery through production.

Your day might include designing a solution architecture for a high-impact agentic use case, debugging a production routing issue deep in our codebase, deploying a new MCP server with a customer team, or aligning with a CTO on a rollout plan; all in service of outstanding outcomes and rapid time to value for the organizations we work with.

This is a founding function. The first FDEs will define how Qodo conducts field engineering: the standards, playbooks, and technical bar. The work is hands-on, commercially scoped, and high-leverage: you'll partner closely with Product, Research, Platform, Security, and GTM, and what you learn in production directly shapes what the core team ships next. If you thrive under ambiguity, make fast and sound decisions when the stakes are high, and get energy from closing the gap between what customers hit in production and what we build next, this role is for you.

In This Role You Will

• Own technical delivery across multiple deployments from first prototype to stable production, including core engineering work that unblocks strategic accounts.
• Lead deep technical diagnosis and remediation in our codebase and production environments, model routing and gateway behavior, large-PR scaling, multi-pass behavior, performance and reliability issues.
• Build customer-specific extensions (MCP servers, agent skills, platform integrations) that deliver immediate value and become durable product capability; upstream them into the main roadmap where appropriate.
• Embed closely with customer engineering teams: serve as their senior technical counterpart for hands-on debugging, architecture reviews, and joint implementation.
• Scope work, sequence delivery, and remove blockers early; make deliberate trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality to protect delivery timelines.
• Partner with Product, Research, and Platform to convert account learnings and eval-driven feedback into roadmap items, specs, and prioritized engineering work.
• Codify working patterns into tools, playbooks, runbooks, and reproducible benchmarks that Support and account teams can operate independently and help scale the field engineering function across the organization.
• Keep teams moving through clarity and follow-through; model calm judgment when the stakes are high.
• Be a champion for our mission in the field: every deployment is an opportunity to demonstrate it.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Bring 5+ years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role as a Forward Deployed Engineer, a Software Engineer with consulting exposure, or a founder with hands-on deployment experience.
• Experience building or consuming MCP servers or agent frameworks.
• Have scoped and delivered complex systems in fast-moving or ambiguous environments you know how to sequence work and protect delivery without slowing everything down.
• Write and review production-quality code in Python, TypeScript or comparable stacks; you contribute directly in the code when it matters.
• Have production experience with LLMs: advanced prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale and you actively stay current with the latest capabilities and implementation patterns.
• Have debugged hard problems in live distributed systems under time pressure and can write a postmortem that actually prevents recurrence.
• Have shipped integrations that started as customer-specific work and became broadly reusable product capability.
• Communicate clearly with engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike; you conduct discovery well, convey technical concepts to diverse audiences, and spot risks early enough to act on them.

Nice to Have

• Background in enterprise platform engineering, multi-tenancy design, or large-scale monorepo tooling.
• Prior work with model routing, inference infrastructure, or LLM gateway systems.