Forward Deployed Engineer

Arcade, Austin, TX

Arcade has this job in 1 other place

San Francisco, CA

The role

Everyone's building AI agents, but almost nobody gets them to production.

Building an impressive demo is easy. Building an AI agent that can securely take action inside enterprise systems is hard. The moment an agent accesses customer data, executes a workflow, or makes changes on behalf of a user, authorization, governance, and trust become the real engineering challenge.

Arcade is the MCP runtime that gives agents the power to do both seamlessly. We connect agents to the systems they act in, then give each one a permission slip and a paper trail - proof of what it's allowed to do, and a record of what it did. That's what makes AI safe to turn loose: real actions, on real systems, already shipping inside Fortune 100 companies.

What you will do

Act as the Technical Authority: Partner with AEs to lead technical discovery and evaluations with Head of AI, CTO, and Architect personas.

What you need

3+ years of experience as a Pre-Sales/Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, or technical consultant who has sold highly technical infrastructure (Databases, Security, Integration, or Cloud), or an engineer ready to pivot into FDE, we want to meet you.
Deep Integration & Systems Architecture Fluency: You've lived the reality of connecting enterprise systems in any form: iPaaS (MuleSoft, Workato, Boomi), ETL/ELT (Informatica, Fivetran, Airbyte), RPA (UiPath, Automation Anywhere), or API gateways and service mesh (Apigee, Kong, Istio). Agentic tool-calling is the next frontier of integration, and you want to build it.
Hands-on Technical Chops: You are comfortable with APIs, SDKs, and coding in modern languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, etc.).
Curiosity & Business Acumen: You don't just answer technical questions; you dig deep to understand the "why" and the business impact of a solution. You can explain high-level concepts to an executive buyer without losing the technical plot.
Evangelist Mindset: You’re a willing presenter, excited to speak at conferences, and interested in creating technical content and blogs to help lead the agentic AI conversation.
AI-Forward Mindset: You actively use AI in your daily workflows and are eager to master the agentic landscape.

Don't Have a Traditional Integration Background? Read This.

Integration is one path in, not the only one. If any of the following describes you, we absolutely want to talk:

AI Agent Builder: You've built with LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar — and you've felt firsthand the pain of giving agents real-world capability.
Backend Engineer: You've shipped production microservices and understand what it takes to run, observe, and scale distributed systems in the real world.
Identity & Security Practitioner: You have deep fluency in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, token lifecycles, delegated auth, and the modern identity stack — because agent authorization is one of the hardest problems we solve.
Infrastructure Engineer: You've lived in Kubernetes, containers, service meshes, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and CI/CD pipelines, and you know how enterprise software actually gets deployed.
Bonus points if you've done meaningful work in data science, ML engineering, or applied AI/ML — it'll sharpen every conversation you have with customer data and AI teams.

Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime

Traction: Real deployments with Fortune 100 Fortune customers.
Founder-Market Fit: Our CEO was previously the VP of Products for Okta where he led all developer product, all new products, and overall product strategy. Prior to Okta he founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. He's done this before - and this time the market is 10x bigger. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis, shipped 100+ LLM applications, and is a contributor to LangChain and LlamaIndex. He knows this space better than anyone.
Dream Team: We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, MongoDB, Redis, Microsoft, Meta, Confluent, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, and Airbyt who've built and founded multiple successful developer platforms.
Perfect Timing: Every enterprise is racing to put agents in production - almost none get there. The problem isn't better models, it's proving which agent can take which action, on behalf of which user, against which system. That's us.
Massive Market : We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation. Every enterprise agent, whether custom-built on frameworks like LangChain or bought from vendors like Anthropic and Microsoft, needs governed access to the systems it acts in. That's the layer we're building.
Backed By The Best: Our Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from Cisco, Morgan Stanley, and Wipro. Our earlier investors have also backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.

The Challenge

We need Forward Deployed Engineers who are deeply technical, incredibly articulate, and possess an insatiable curiosity for what’s possible. You aren't just giving demos; you are a systems thinker who can walk into a Fortune 500 customer and understand their entire technology landscape - identity, data, application, and governance layers - to design architectures that survive a rigorous security review. You’ll need to stay three steps ahead of the rapidly evolving Agentic AI ecosystem, mastering LLM orchestration, autonomous agent frameworks, and the complex world of tool-calling and action-oriented infrastructure.

You won't just be a vendor; you’ll be a trusted consultant helping customers architect the transition from passive chat to active, automated intelligence.

Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

What you will do

Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

The Revolution Needs You

Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime

Join The Movement

Pay and benefits

Arcade