Forward Deployed Engineer
Arcade· startup· Computer Software· Sep 4, 2026 · 2mo ago
Austin, TX
Hybrid
Full-time
Mid
$144K–$195K est.
3+ years exp
Job description
Everyone's building AI agents, but almost nobody gets them to production.
Building an impressive demo is easy. Building an AI agent that can securely take action inside enterprise systems is hard. The moment an agent accesses customer data, executes a workflow, or makes changes on behalf of a user, authorization, governance, and trust become the real engineering challenge.
Arcade is the MCP runtime that gives agents the power to do both seamlessly. We connect agents to the systems they act in, then give each one a permission slip and a paper trail - proof of what it's allowed to do, and a record of what it did. That's what makes AI safe to turn loose: real actions, on real systems, already shipping inside Fortune 100 companies.
The Revolution Needs You
Every AI app needs agentic tools that let AI models take real actions. Without tools, AI can only chat. With tools, AI can actually do things. We're building the definitive tools catalog,actions platform, and governance model that will unlock AI's true potential. Think Zapier for AI Actions. Think Auth0 for AI. Think really big.
Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime
- Traction: Real deployments with Fortune-100 customers like Morgan Stanley and Open Table
- Founder-Market Fit: Our CEO previously founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. He's done this before - and this time the market is 10x bigger. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis, shipped 100+ LLM applications, and is a contributor to LangChain and LlamaIndex. He knows this space better than anyone.
- Dream Team: We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE who've built and founded multiple successful developer platforms.
- Perfect Timing: Every enterprise is racing to put agents in production - almost none get there. The problem isn't better models, it's proving which agent can take which action, on behalf of which user, against which system. That's us.
- Massive Market : We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation. Every AI app will need what we're building.
- Backed By The Best: Our Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from Morgan Stanley and Wipro. Our earlier investors have also backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.
The Challenge
We need Forward Deployed Engineers who are deeply technical, incredibly articulate, and possess an insatiable curiosity for what’s possible. You aren't just giving demos; you are a systems thinker who can walk into a Fortune 500 customer and understand their entire technology landscape - identity, data, application, and governance layers - to design architectures that survive a rigorous security review. You’ll need to stay three steps ahead of the rapidly evolving Agentic AI ecosystem, mastering LLM orchestration, autonomous agent frameworks, and the complex world of tool-calling and action-oriented infrastructure. You won't just be a vendor; you’ll be a trusted consultant helping customers architect the transition from passive chat to active, automated intelligence.
What You'll Do
- Act as the Technical Authority: Partner with AEs to lead technical discovery and evaluations with Head of AI, CTO, and Architect personas.
- Build the "Art of the Possible": Design and build custom prototypes, PoCs, and reference architectures that show exactly how our infrastructure enables real-world AI actions.
- Simplify the Complex: Take abstract infrastructure, middleware, and API concepts and turn them into clear, value-driven solutions for customers.
- Field-to-Product Loop: Act as the eyes and ears of the market, funneling deep technical feedback back to our Product and Engineering teams to shape the roadmap. We build our product like a private open-source project; if a feature or fix is needed to unblock a deployment, you are empowered to make it happen. You can take customer learnings to create working prototypes and systems that can eventually become part of the core platform.
- Drive Technical Wins: Navigate complex technical hurdles in deal cycles ranging from $200K+ to seven figures.
- Master the AI Stack: Stay at the bleeding edge of the ecosystem (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Vector DBs) to consult customers on their broader AI strategy.
Required Skills
- 3+ years of experience as a Pre-Sales/Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, or technical consultant who has sold highly technical infrastructure (Databases, Security, Integration, or Cloud), or an engineer ready to pivot into FDE, we want to meet you.
- Deep Integration & Systems Architecture Fluency: You've lived the reality of connecting enterprise systems in any form: iPaaS (MuleSoft, Workato, Boomi), ETL/ELT (Informatica, Fivetran, Airbyte), RPA (UiPath, Automation Anywhere), or API gateways and service mesh (Apigee, Kong, Istio). Agentic tool-calling is the next frontier of integration, and you want to build it.
- Hands-on Technical Chops: You are comfortable with APIs, SDKs, and coding in modern languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, etc.).
- Curiosity & Business Acumen: You don't just answer technical questions; you dig deep to understand the "why" and the business impact of a solution. You can explain high-level concepts to an executive buyer without losing the technical plot.
- Evangelist Mindset: You’re a willing presenter, excited to speak at conferences, and interested in creating technical content and blogs to help lead the agentic AI conversation.
- AI-Forward Mindset: You actively use AI in your daily workflows and are eager to master the agentic landscape.
Don't Have a Traditional Integration Background? Read This.
Integration is one path in, not the only one. If any of the following describes you, we absolutely want to talk:
- AI Agent Builder: You've built with LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar — and you've felt firsthand the pain of giving agents real-world capability.
- Backend Engineer: You've shipped production microservices and understand what it takes to run, observe, and scale distributed systems in the real world.
- Identity & Security Practitioner: You have deep fluency in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, token lifecycles, delegated auth, and the modern identity stack — because agent authorization is one of the hardest problems we solve.
- Infrastructure Engineer: You've lived in Kubernetes, containers, service meshes, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and CI/CD pipelines, and you know how enterprise software actually gets deployed.
- Bonus points if you've done meaningful work in data science, ML engineering, or applied AI/ML — it'll sharpen every conversation you have with customer data and AI teams.
Join The Movement
We're not just building a product - we're leading a movement to transform AI from just chatbots to agents that can take actions against real systems. This is your chance to be at the forefront of that revolution.
If you want to look back in 5 years and say, "I helped build that", then we want to talk to you.
Compensation and Benefits
This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits. Compensation is aligned with the range below and determined based on a candidate's background, experience, and performance.
Compensation: Starting at $180,000 base salary, plus equity and competitive benefits.
Application prep
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Keywords to mirror
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- Platform
- ashby
- Effort
- quick