Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Cyber

Eliza • Remote, US,

6d • Remote

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Cyber builds and deploys AI-enabled security solutions with customers. The role combines cybersecurity expertise and software engineering across discovery, architecture, integration, deployment, evaluation, and handover. The engineer owns technical decisions that turn ambiguous security problems into useful, maintainable capabilities in customer environments.

This is a fully remote role with substantial autonomy and direct client contact. The engineer works with security practitioners, engineering teams, and delivery and commercial partners, clarifying tradeoffs and keeping technical commitments credible. Experienced cyber engineers and senior technical leaders who want to remain hands-on are welcome.

Eliza is AI-native. The engineer uses agentic coding tools, including OpenAI Daybreak, and inspects and verifies their output. The role calls for practical judgment about where models help, where they fail, and where human judgment belongs, as well as adaptability and ownership through validated outcomes.

Requirements

• Deep practical cybersecurity expertise, including hands-on blue-team experience in detection, investigation, response, or defensive security engineering, with specific examples of personally owned decisions and outcomes.
• Strong software engineering skills beyond security scripting, including production code, integrations, debugging, testing, and maintainable system design.
• A record of taking complex technical work from problem definition through deployment, validation, and operational handover.
• Practical AI fluency, including effective use of AI development tools and sound judgment about model evaluation, failure modes, and human review.
• Experience deploying and troubleshooting software in cloud or customer-hosted environments, with practical understanding of identity and access, APIs, delivery pipelines, and production observability.
• Clear customer-facing communication and ability to translate an ambiguous need into technical requirements and acceptance evidence.
• Senior technical judgment: ability to work independently, make tradeoffs explicit, recognize limits of expertise, and escalate material risks early.
• Ownership of useful outcomes, including verification, documentation, and adoption after the initial build.

Nice To Haves

• Additional depth in application security, AI agent security, security developer tooling, or purple-team and red-team work.
• Consulting, professional services, forward-deployed engineering, or comparable direct customer delivery experience.
• Experience with vulnerability remediation, investigation automation, identity and access controls, or secure AI integrations.
• Experience in defense or other demanding security environments, or a record of creating reusable technical capabilities across engagements.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with customer security and engineering teams to understand workflows, systems, data, risks, and operating constraints.
• Define a tractable problem, baseline, architecture, and acceptance criteria; explain what to build, defer, or escalate.
• Align engineering work with measurable security outcomes and make scope, dependencies, and tradeoffs visible.
• Write, review, and debug production software connecting models, APIs, telemetry, and security systems for detection, investigation, and vulnerability remediation.
• Choose tools and architecture appropriate to each engagement, balancing speed, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Use AI coding tools effectively while retaining ownership of code quality, correctness, and security.
• Own deployment and troubleshooting with customer owners, including configuration, access, CI/CD, monitoring, and integration failures.
• Establish release, rollback, and operating procedures for delivered capabilities.
• Resolve issues across system boundaries and surface technical or delivery risks early with recommendations.
• Threat-model AI-enabled workflows and test realistic failure cases, including prompt injection, sensitive-data exposure, and unsafe tool actions.
• Build practical controls across prompts, data flows, APIs, and cloud services, including least-privilege access, secrets protection, auditability, and human approval for consequential actions.
• Verify that fixes address the original problem, document limitations, and involve specialist reviewers when needed.
• Explain architecture, evidence, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Challenge requests that would undermine security or usefulness and offer practical alternatives.
• Work with delivery and commercial partners on commitments and additional opportunities grounded in demonstrated customer value.
• Produce documentation, interfaces, runbooks, and knowledge transfer so customer teams can operate and extend delivered work.
• Agree operating ownership and handover criteria, or continued operation when the engagement calls for it.
• Turn proven solutions and lessons into reusable engineering patterns, evaluation cases, and playbooks; share technical guidance with colleagues.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation (base salary plus performance incentives tied to client outcomes).
• Equity options in a growing AI services company.
• Exposure to a wide range of industries and high-impact AI problems.
• Travel opportunities for on-site client engagements, if desired.
• A collaborative, mission-driven team passionate about the real-world impact of AI.
• Fully remote work.
• Ownership of substantive cyber engineering work and the opportunity to shape reusable approaches to AI-enabled security delivery.

What This Job Offers

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