About the RoleWe are looking for Render's first Forward Deployed Engineer to work hands-on with our most strategic customers. Our largest contracts and fastest-growing AI startups are scaling on Render, and this role provides them with a dedicated, concierge-level technical partnership. You will balance two motions: white-glove engagement with our top accounts, where you work closely with the customer's engineering team as a trusted technical partner, and scoped onboarding intensives that get high-growth startups confidently building on the platform. As the first FDE in our Field Engineering organization, you will define the playbook for this function, prove the model, and shape how it scales.
What You'll Do- 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.
What We're Looking For- 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.
Nice-to-Haves- Migration experience from Heroku, AWS, or other clouds onto modern platforms.
- Hands-on experience shipping AI and LLM applications (RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, inference workloads); many of our fastest-growing accounts are AI-native.
- Prior experience as the first hire in a role or a founding member of a new program.
If this role excites you but you don't meet every single requirement, we'd still love to hear from you-your unique experience might be just what we need.
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.
This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.
