Forward Deployed Engineer - Infrastructure

Thought Machine•New York, NY

6d•$140,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Thought Machine's mission is to replace legacy technology in the world's banks with modern, cloud-native core and payments technology. The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is the primary technical interface with clients, embedding with their engineering teams to design, build, and deliver production-ready implementations of Thought Machine's Vault and associated products. This role involves enabling clients to achieve best-in-class cloud-native implementations on various infrastructures, from presales through to large-scale production. FDEs manage Vault deployments end-to-end, covering business logic engineering, client infrastructure preparation, deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting. The role requires tangible infrastructure experience to work with clients and act as an extension of internal SRE teams. FDEs operate across the full project lifecycle, ensuring requirements are met, tested, and that client feedback is used to improve the product. Travel to client sites is expected (up to 25%), requiring autonomous work in complex environments and acting as a liaison between Thought Machine's product engineering and client delivery teams.

Requirements

Ability to explain technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Hands-on experience of some or all of the following: Linux/Unix administration (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian), Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Istio.
Experience with automation/configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible).
Experience with AWS or GCP.

Nice To Haves

Experience with at least two cloud providers and associated certifications for at least one of the following: AWS (ideally certified Solutions Architect Professional), GCP (ideally certified Professional Cloud Architect), Azure (ideally certified Solutions Architect Expert).
Experience of enterprise secrets management systems (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS secrets manager).
Experience in supporting production systems for high profile, mission critical systems, ideally for a tier 1 financial institution.
Experience with hybrid cloud technologies including OpenShift, Google Anthos, AWS EKS Anywhere, AWS Outposts.
A strong background in Go, Python or Java.
Experience with CockroachDB, AlloyDB, Aurora.
Experience with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).

Responsibilities

Hands-on cloud infrastructure consulting both on client site and remote.
Working with customers and external partners to design and prepare suitable cloud infrastructure to ensure Thought Machine Vault products can be tested and run successfully at scale. Includes planning for high availability, disaster recovery, backup, redundancy, capacity and security.
Deploying and configuring Thought Machine Vault products on client, SaaS and internal cloud infrastructure.
Developing deep understanding of and advising clients on optimization of cloud infrastructure for overarching implementation of Vault, including advising on systems outside of Vault to empower holistic digital transformation in collaboration with Thought Machine Client Architects.
Supporting and troubleshooting client, SaaS and internal cloud infrastructure both remotely and on site, including by promoting and deploying suitable monitoring, logging and alerting tools.
Working closely with internal product and engineering teams to ensure client feedback is incorporated into improvements to the product and platform.
Supporting the Thought Machine Commercial Team and Cloud Provider Partners in answering infrastructure queries and challenges in the presales cycle.