Forward Deployed Engineer (SDEV)

PagerDuty•San Francisco, CA

1d•$145,000 - $218,900•Hybrid

About The Position

PagerDuty is seeking a customer-focused Forward Deployed Engineer to join its SRE Agent team. The role works within PagerDuty’s largest customer accounts to connect the SRE Agent to production environments—including observability tools, infrastructure-as-code systems, GitOps tooling, and CI/CD pipelines—and to guide customer teams from AI-assisted incident response toward supervised and autonomous actions with safety guardrails. The engineer will also contribute code to the core SRE Agent product, building reusable tools, connectors, and skills based on customer needs. As a Staff Engineer on the product engineering team, this person will help shape how agentic AI operates in strategic customer environments, combining software engineering expertise, production experience with LLM and agent systems, and the ability to connect technical execution with business strategy. The role is expected to be based in the PagerDuty San Francisco office or at a client site at least two days per week. It requires travel of 25–50% during active customer engagements. PagerDuty operates a hybrid work model, and candidates must reside in a location eligible for the role. The base salary range is $145,000–$218,900 USD; the role may also be eligible for bonus, commission, equity, and/or benefits.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience building and shipping production software across team boundaries, assessed against PagerDuty Staff Engineer / SDE V expectations.
Hands-on production experience with LLM and agent systems, including agent development, tool-use frameworks such as MCP or equivalent, evaluation pipelines, and guardrail design.
Ability to lead technical design sessions with customer engineers and present the business case to customer leadership.
Comfort working with ambiguity, taking vague problem statements in unfamiliar environments through to working software with little direction.
A record of shipping adopted software and sound judgment about which customer requests generalize and when not to build.
Demonstrated infrastructure and deployment expertise with Terraform or Pulumi at scale, GitOps such as ArgoCD or equivalent, CI/CD pipeline design, and progressive delivery patterns such as canary, blue/green, and soak periods.
Willingness to travel 25–50% during active customer engagements.

Nice To Haves

Practical operational knowledge of incident management and observability concepts, including on-call, postmortems, SLOs/SLIs, and alerting.
Customer-facing technical consulting, forward-deployed engineering, or solutions architecture experience in addition to a core software engineering background.
Founder or founding engineer experience, including navigating high ambiguity and driving unscripted problem-solving.
Experience with policy-as-code, fine-grained permissioning, or safety guardrail patterns for agent-driven automation.
Production experience with PagerDuty or competing digital operations and incident management platforms.
Active open-source contributions to the AI agent or Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Work onsite and regularly with 2–4 strategic customer teams to deploy the SRE Agent, configure tools and connectors, and embed AI actions across their incident management lifecycle to drive adoption and value.
Scope, design, and build reusable agent tools, connectors, and skills on the agent’s extensibility surfaces, and ship them through the product team’s repositories, review process, and evaluation gates.
Run pilots of new agentic capabilities with strategic accounts, gather evaluation data, identify technical blockers such as permissions, telemetry, or missing connectors, and build production fixes into the product.
Connect the SRE Agent to infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Pulumi, GitOps tools such as ArgoCD, CI/CD pipelines, and observability platforms; guide customers safely from AI-assisted to autonomous operations.
Define 3–6 month technical roadmaps across assigned accounts, provide architectural guidance to product managers and engineering managers, and bring customer friction and evaluation data back to the core team.

Benefits

Competitive salary
Comprehensive benefits package
Flexible work arrangements
Company equity
Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
Retirement or pension plan
Generous paid vacation time
Paid holidays and sick leave
Dutonian Wellness Days and HibernationDuty companywide paid days off in addition to PTO
Paid parental leave: 22 weeks for pregnant parents and 12 weeks for non-pregnant parents, subject to local standards
Paid volunteer time off: 20 hours per year
Company-wide hack weeks
Mental wellness programs