Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Zuora • Foster City, CA

1d • $208,600 - $312,900

About The Position

Zuora is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, internally called a Delta, to embed with customer engineering teams and build production-quality integrations, prototypes, and AI agents. The role sits in Zuora’s Product & Engineering organization and works in a pod with a Forward Deployed Product Manager and, when needed, another engineer. The focus is on agentic quote-to-cash, helping enterprises monetize AI-native and usage-based products, and deploying Zuora’s AI agents with initial customers.

The engineer co-builds the ideal end-state integration with customers, taking work from idea to production in weeks or months. They identify platform gaps, build practical solutions, and document what Product should develop next. Engagements use signed specifications, customer data, security reviews, monitoring, and evaluations for AI workflows. The role also involves integrating Zuora with customer systems, building AI-monetization capabilities, and ensuring customers can operate delivered solutions independently after handoff.

The position collaborates across Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales, Services, Support, customer teams, and partners. It includes a post-launch warranty period of roughly 30–60 days, followed by handoff to a named maintainer. The role does not retain an ongoing maintenance portfolio. Zuora’s technology includes its Billing and Revenue platform APIs; customer-side integration stacks vary by engagement.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including customer-facing delivery or startup engineering.
• Strong integration and API engineering experience, with production code shipped against external or partner systems rather than only internal services.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript; Java is a plus.
• Experience with REST, webhooks, event-driven patterns, and solid SQL.
• Experience taking code to production, including security review, observability, and on-call readiness.
• Sound security judgment for systems that handle financial data.
• Hands-on experience building production LLM applications or agents, including tool calling, retrieval, and prompt engineering, and evaluating output before it reaches customers.
• Experience using AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor as part of everyday development, with an ability to explain how their output was reviewed before shipping.
• Ability to deliver quickly in engagements measured in weeks or months rather than quarters or years.
• Strong technical communication under ambiguity, including the ability to work with customer staff engineers and explain trade-offs to finance users and architects.
• Ability and inclination to document work, including specifications, gap reports, and the engagement exit Brief.
• Builder mindset, demonstrated by having shipped a product, integration, agent, or tool used by real people.
• Ownership and sound judgment, including taking on difficult problems, weighing cost, speed, and customer impact, and following work through to completion.
• Polite persistence and curiosity when navigating customer, partner, and internal-team challenges.
• Ability to deliver outcomes by involving people and agents beyond one’s own team.
• Low-ego adaptability suited to a founding role whose responsibilities may evolve.

Nice To Haves

• Founder or early-team experience, ideally in AI monetization, agentic product development and deployment, or the quote-to-cash lifecycle.
• Experience with subscription billing, usage-based pricing, payments, or monetization platforms.
• Exposure to agentic or usage-based AI pricing models, AI agents, MCP servers, or agent frameworks.
• Prior customer-facing or forward-deployed engineering experience.
• ERP, CRM, or finance integration experience, including NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, Workday, or similar systems.
• Familiarity with SOX or IT general controls.

Responsibilities

• Co-build integrations, prototypes, and agents with customer engineering teams in engagements lasting weeks to months, delivering production-quality code with a defined destination and maintainer.
• Co-author engagement specifications with the Forward Deployed Product Manager and build only after approval by the customer sponsor, FDE leadership, and Product & Engineering.
• Prototype using real customer data, then prepare solutions for production with security reviews, monitoring, and evaluations for AI-driven workflows.
• Design and deliver production agents and multi-agent workflows, including tool and function calling, sub-agents, orchestration, MCP servers and clients, and context and retrieval optimized for quality, latency, and cost.
• Integrate Zuora with customer technology stacks, including metering and entitlement tools, ERP, CRM, and finance systems, with Zuora as the order-to-revenue system of record.
• Build AI-monetization integrations for usage and AI-credit metering feeds, credit wallets and drawdown, and related billing and revenue flows.
• Deploy Zuora’s new AI agents with initial customers and extend the platform to new use cases and customer segments.
• Build evaluation harnesses and golden datasets with product managers and customer experts; establish acceptance thresholds and run evaluations in CI to gate changes.
• Implement guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls, including least-privilege access, approval gates for write actions, and segregation of duties.
• Instrument agent activity with tracing and logs of prompts, inputs, outputs, and model versions so actions can be reconstructed for audit.
• Use AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor in everyday development and review their output with production rigor.
• Report product gaps to the roadmap and write an engagement Brief at exit documenting what was built, what broke, what is reusable, and where it should live next.
• Turn successful work into reusable components and leave behind tools, components, and agents that accelerate future engagements.
• Hold the post-launch warranty window, approximately 30–60 days after go-live, then hand off to the named maintainer with runbooks and documentation.
• Upskill customer teams so they can operate delivered solutions independently.
• Delegate to agents and coordinate Zuora engineers, partners, and customer engineers to increase delivery capacity.
• Onboard new teammates within live engagements using a watch one, do one, teach one progression.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus, and performance-based reward opportunities.
• Retirement programs.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous flexible time off, paid holidays, wellness days, and a company-wide year-end break.
• Paid parental leave, including fully paid leave for eligible employees subject to local policy.
• Learning and development stipend.
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation matching where available.
• Mental wellbeing resources and support.
• Potential bonus or variable compensation and equity as elements of the total rewards package.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed