Forward Deployed Engineer

Dropzone AI

2h•$170,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

Dropzone AI is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to support strategic customer accounts and help make Dropzone more trusted, accurate, and embedded in customers’ day-to-day security operations. The role works with customers, TAMs, Product, Engineering, and security stakeholders to understand customer workflows, policies, escalation paths, exceptions, analyst expectations, and operational goals. This is not a traditional implementation manager role and does not replace the TAM, who remains the primary owner of the customer relationship and account management. The Forward Deployed Engineer provides deeper technical and operational support, including direct customer engagement during onboarding, optimization, large-scale pilots, and high-priority account work. The role also works behind the scenes with internal teams to review investigations, identify tuning opportunities, configure customer-specific behaviors, refine response workflows, and measure operational value and customer trust. The position helps create continuity from pre-sales discovery through post-sales operationalization for strategic customers. It is remote, with work performed from home using company-provided equipment. Semi-frequent local and national travel to professional office settings and other events is expected, including some overnight travel. The base salary range is $170,000–$190,000 USD. Compensation is determined in part by location, skills, education, and experience. Compensation packages include new-hire equity grants and benefits including company-paid health insurance, a 401(k) plan with employer match, self-managed PTO, and parental leave.

Requirements

At least 4 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Security Engineer, Detection Engineer, Technical Customer Success Engineer, or Sales Engineer.
Strong understanding of SOC workflows, alert triage, escalation paths, investigation quality, analyst expectations, and security operations.
Technical acumen in areas such as scripting, development, APIs, integrations, networking, SRE, CloudOps, DevOps, or security automation.
Ability to translate ambiguous customer context into precise technical configuration.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Excellent judgment around customer requests, product gaps, risk, scope, and escalation paths.
Ability to manage multiple customer workstreams with strong follow-through.
Comfort working directly with customers and behind the scenes with TAMs, Product, and Engineering.
Comfort working in an early-stage environment with ambiguity and high ownership.
Early-stage startup mindset and ability to execute quickly amid ambiguity.
Data-driven approach.

Nice To Haves

Experience with SIEM, EDR, SOAR, cloud security, detection engineering, or security automation.
Experience with APIs, integrations, or workflow automation.
Experience supporting large enterprise pilots or strategic customer deployments.
Experience building repeatable customer delivery playbooks.
Experience working across pre-sales and post-sales motions for strategic accounts.

Responsibilities

Support strategic customer accounts as a technical and operationalization-focused resource.
Partner with TAMs to help customers operationalize Dropzone while leaving the TAM as the primary account owner.
Lead or support technical discovery for strategic customers, strategic pilots, and high-profile accounts.
Review Dropzone investigations to identify tuning opportunities, outcome alignment gaps, workflow friction, and ways to improve customer trust.
Draft and refine tuning recommendations based on customer environments, workflows, policies, and analyst expectations.
Configure response workflows, notifications, escalation paths, and customer-approved behaviors.
Translate customer SOC practices into precise, approved Dropzone behavior.
Help customers identify functional alternatives or product-supported paths before escalating product gaps.
Open and document internal support or product cases when customer needs cannot be met through existing functionality.
Produce tuning, efficacy, and operationalization reports for strategic accounts.
Track impact through analyst feedback, outcome disagreement trends, benign resolution trends, tuning coverage, workflow adoption, and customer trust indicators.
Partner with Product and Engineering to escalate product gaps with clear evidence and customer context.
Build repeatable playbooks for customer tuning, operationalization, and long-term maintenance.
Maintain clear boundaries between strategic operationalization, standard support, incident response, and custom development.