Forward Deployed Engineer

Cyberhaven•San Francisco, CA

14d

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) in Cyberhaven’s R&D organization, you will embed deeply with enterprise customers deploying Cyberhaven’s Content Inspection (CI) stack in their own cloud or datacenter environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes). You operate where real customer environments meet product engineering—turning complex deployments, failures, and edge cases into concrete product and reliability improvements.This role is hands-on, highly technical, and outward-facing. You are part of R&D, and will partner with SRE, Sales Engineering, Professional Services, and Customer Support to accelerate successful customer outcomes while strengthening CI’s architecture, operability, and scalability as DSPM on-prem connectors become the norm.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Production Engineering, SRE, or customer-facing roles embedded within an R&D or product engineering organization.
Deep, hands-on experience with Linux, containers, and Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS, or self-managed clusters).
Experience delivering and operating on-prem or hybrid enterprise software, including Kubernetes platforms and virtual appliances.
Strong understanding of enterprise networking and security (TLS, DNS, load balancers, proxies, firewalls).
Skilled at debugging distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces, and comfortable navigating unfamiliar systems quickly.
Confident working directly with enterprise customers on architecture discussions, deployments, and high-severity incidents.
Product-minded: you naturally turn customer friction into actionable engineering improvements.
Clear communicator who can operate across engineering, go-to-market, and customer-facing teams.

Responsibilities

Act as an R&D owner for customer deployments of on-prem and hybrid Content Inspection (CI), ensuring real-world requirements inform product behavior and roadmap decisions.
Work directly with customers to architect, deploy, and validate CI in production environments, including Kubernetes, Helm, networking, security, and performance considerations.
Lead investigation of complex customer issues by reproducing them in lab or test clusters, either delivering fixes or driving them to resolution within R&D.
Serve as a technical point of contact for high-severity CI incidents, joining customer bridges and coordinating resolution across R&D, SRE, and Customer Support.
Partner with SRE on reliability, capacity planning, upgrade safety, and operational readiness for on-prem CI.
Collaborate with Sales Engineering during late-stage evaluations and technical deep dives to ensure CI can meet customer architecture, scale, and security requirements.
Co-lead deployments and upgrades with Professional Services, validating prerequisites, reviewing configurations, and shaping best practices for repeatable success.
Act as the R&D point person for DSPM on-prem connectors, supporting design partners, validating new capabilities, and enabling large-scale customer rollouts.
Drive product improvements by owning feedback related to diagnostics, observability, configuration safety, upgrade/rollback behavior, and supportability.
Create internal design notes, runbooks, and technical documentation that bridge customer reality and engineering intent.
Participate in design reviews, release readiness, and post-incident retrospectives to ensure customer learnings are captured and acted on.