Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

BetterUp, Austin, TX +3

The role

We do. We can't cram it all in here, but you'll start noticing it from the first interview.

Even our candidate experience is different. And when you get an offer from us (and accept it), you get way more than a paycheck. You get a personal BetterUp Coach, a development plan, a trained and coached manager, the most amazing team you've ever met (yes, each with their own personal BetterUp Coach), and most importantly, work that matters.

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Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

BetterUp, Austin, TX +3

Posted pay

$230K–$320K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is near the median for principal software engineering jobs in the Bay Area.

Median: $280K a year
Other jobs in the group: 222

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: Austin, TX +3
Work type: Hybrid
Level: Principal
Experience: 10+ years
Posted: Today
Last check: 2 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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BetterUp

Open tech jobs: 4
With posted pay: 100%

About BetterUp: funding, hiring and pay

BetterUp

About BetterUp: funding, hiring and pay

Company facts

Money raised: At least $486MSum of SEC filings. A filing does not show all money that a company raises.
Newest raise: Sep 19, 2024First sale on an SEC filing

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

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The role

We do. We can't cram it all in here, but you'll start noticing it from the first interview.

What you will do

Set the architecture on the hardest accounts in the book. You walk into a customer whose environment we don't know yet and leave with a design their architects accept, our engineers can build, and core engineering can live with.
Decide whether we build, configure, or refuse. Some asks are a week of configuration, some are a real build, and some would fork the product. You make that call early, in writing, and you defend it to the customer and to our own leadership.
Own the pattern for putting the coach inside a customer's front door. That means agent-to-agent integration on standard protocols like MCP and A2A, into Copilot, Teams, and customers' own agent platforms, designed once so the fifth customer is configuration.
Write the engineering standards for Forward Deployment. The security bar for customer-facing builds, sandbox and data isolation, customer-data handling, and what "ready to graduate" means. Our code touches HR systems and member data at customers who run us through security review, and the standards are yours to write and hold.
Own the seam with core engineering. Every custom build ends one of three ways: it graduates into the platform with core engineering's acceptance, it converts to paid work, or we kill it. You make the technical case at the monthly graduation board, and you design builds so the ones worth keeping can be accepted cleanly.
Build the shared deployment infrastructure. A real customer sandbox, the tooling that turns a customer's own material into a working context library, and the evaluation harness that tells us whether a configured coach behaves the way that customer needs. Each new account should start from what the last one built.
Carry the technical relationship where the decision sits. You'll work with a customer's CTO, CISO, and enterprise architects, and you'll write the answers on data hosting, model training, and legal holds that their governance committee asks for.
Keep building. You write code on the hardest problems yourself, and the first version of every shared pattern is yours.
Raise the bar for every Forward Deployed engineer. You won't manage people. The way you design, review, and document becomes how the other squads work.

What you need

What you'll bring

10+ years building and shipping production software, including several years as the technical owner of systems deployed inside large enterprises.
A record of leading the technical side of customer deployments where the contract value ran into seven or eight figures.
Architecture depth across identity, data, and integration: single sign-on and provisioning, HRIS, data pipelines, and multi-tenant isolation. You've designed for a customer's security review and passed it.
Production experience with LLM and agent systems: tool use, retrieval and context, guardrails, and evaluation. You've been accountable for how an AI system behaved in front of real users.
Credibility with senior technical audiences on both sides of the table. You've briefed a customer's CTO or CISO and your own engineering leadership, and you've delivered bad news to both without losing the room.
A record of turning one-off customer work into platform capability, and of killing the work that didn't deserve it.
Experience with agent protocols (MCP, A2A) or building inside Microsoft Teams, Copilot, or Slack is a plus.
Domain expertise in organizational transformation, human transformation, or talent intelligence is a plus.

Skills & competencies

Relentless agency. When something isn't working, you own it and fix it instead of naming the team that should have. Humility about what you don't know, and relentlessness about figuring it out anyway.
Architectural judgment under ambiguity. You pick the simplest design that survives the customer's constraints, and you can say what would make you change it.
The discipline to say no. A happy customer asking for one more thing is the hardest no in this job, and so is telling your own leadership that an ask would fork the product. You can do both without damaging the relationship.
Judgment about what generalizes. You can tell a custom build worth paving into the platform from one customer's snowflake, and you'll argue for the distinction in front of core engineering.
Executive technical communication. You can write the architecture note a CISO's team will read, and explain the same decision to a Chief People Officer in two minutes.
AI-native fluency. Building with agents is your default operating method, and you set the practices the rest of the team builds with.
Comfort deciding on incomplete information. You listen, synthesize, decide, and move. When you're wrong you correct fast and say so. You don't stall waiting for consensus.

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

What you'll bring

Skills & competencies

Nice to have

Why this role

AI at BetterUp

Austin and Arlington: $230,000 - $285,000

Pay and benefits

About BetterUp

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Company facts

Interview questions

BetterUp

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