Forward Deployed Engineer
Job Description
We Are Praetorian
Praetorian is defined by raw intensity, fearless candor, and a relentless drive. This is who we are.
We are looking for high-performing, mission-aligned individuals. We prioritize performance over politics and purpose over transaction. This environment is built for those who seek ownership and impact.
Is Praetorian the right fit for you? If you are someone who obsesses over the problem, defaults to open communication, and wants to work with a team that refuses to accept mediocrity—then you have found your home.
The Mission
Praetorian is an expert-driven offensive security company. Our mission is to prevent breaches before they occur. We help organizations shift from an "assume breach" mentality to adopting offensive security as a core strategy of prevention.
We don’t just find bugs; we solve the root cause. We are building a future without compromise, and we need people who run toward the fire.
Who We Are Looking For
We are looking for a Forward Deploy Engineer who operates with clear ownership. You're not just answering tickets. You're setting the standard for what customer-facing engineering looks like. You believe the issue in front of you is the floor, not the job — the real work is making sure the next ten customers never hit it.
How You Operate
You are customer-first by default. When a customer hits a wall, you get them unblocked, and you measure yourself by how fast and how completely that happens. You bring mission-driven grit to every challenge, running toward hard problems rather than away from them. You prioritize customer outcomes over internal processes, and you choose truth and clarity over performative politeness. Being customer-first does not mean customer-always-right — you have the maturity to recognize an unreasonable request and handle it professionally: hold the line, explain why, and offer the path that actually works. The same judgment applies inward. You handle most issues yourself, and when a problem is truly a product defect or a relationship decision, you escalate deliberately to engineering or our CEO, with your diagnosis attached.
How are you using AI today in your current role? What specific tools are you using? If applicable, show us your last AI experiment.
What You Will Own
- Own the Response: Own technical requests end-to-end — integration setup, error troubleshooting, root-cause diagnosis — for the Praetorian Guard Platform, our unified Continuous Threat Exposure Management service spanning attack surface management, vulnerability management, breach and attack simulation, continuous penetration testing, and exploit intelligence. You are a credible technical peer to the customer's security team, closing the loop with answers they can act on.
- Scale Yourself Through Self-Help: Make customers self-sufficient. Build the documentation, video walkthroughs, and self-serve tools that deflect the next ten tickets, fix bad docs the same day, and use AI tooling to operate beyond what one person could handle manually. Success looks like an issue queue that shrinks as the customer base grows.
- Be the Customer's Voice: Turn recurring friction into well-formed product feedback. Know when the answer is "no, here's the workaround" versus "yes, this belongs on the roadmap," and back every recommendation with evidence rather than requests relayed verbatim.
- Ship the Fix Yourself: For simple changes — error message clarity, small UI papercuts — ship the PR yourself. Hand off larger problems to engineering with your diagnosis and reproduction steps attached.
What You Bring
- The Foundation: A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience, plus 2–5 years in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, customer success engineering, or security operations.
- Customer Presence: You handle people as well as you handle systems. You are credible and unflustered in front of a skeptical CISO, with writing clear enough to become documentation the moment you hit send.
- Troubleshooting Depth: You diagnose unfamiliar systems to root cause — auth, permissions, network, data — and verify out-of-band with tools like curl, dig, and nmap.
- Engineering Ability: You navigate a production codebase, scope a small change safely, and ship a reviewed PR.
- Teacher's Instinct: You'd rather make ten customers self-sufficient than answer the same question ten times, and you treat every repeated question as a defect in the self-help surface.
- Product Sense: You distinguish what one customer wants from what the customer base needs, and you back product feedback with evidence.
- AI Leverage: You use AI agents and automation to operate at a scale one person couldn't reach manually, without sacrificing accuracy or judgment.
- Security Fluency (a plus): Working knowledge of attack surface management, vulnerability management, or offensive security — enough to speak credibly about why a finding matters.
If This Position Is Wildly Successful, In One Year You Will Have:
- Driven your issue queue down even as the customer base grew, by systematically eliminating the root causes behind repeat tickets
- Built a self-help surface — documentation, video walkthroughs, and self-serve tools — that customers reach for before they ever open a ticket
- Become the trusted technical peer that customer security teams ask for by name, credible enough to hold the line on an unreasonable request and keep the relationship strong
- Shipped fixes directly to the Guard platform codebase for the small, high-friction papercuts, and handed off the larger problems to engineering with diagnoses clean enough to act on immediately
- Closed the gap between the field and the roadmap by turning recurring customer friction into well-formed, evidence-backed product feedback that engineering actually shipped
- Integrated AI tooling into your daily workflow, operating at a scale one person couldn't reach manually without sacrificing accuracy or judgment
- Raised the bar for what customer-facing engineering means at Praetorian, setting the standard the next hires are measured against
Why Praetorian?
We offer a culture built on high performance and deep ownership.
- Elite Talent: Work alongside the top 1% of the industry—composed exclusively of high performers who raise the bar.
- Our DNA: We are defined by action, grit, and uncompromising transparency. We move fast, take on hard problems, and choose clarity over comfort—because that’s how meaningful work gets done.
- Impact: Your work directly protects the world's most critical organizations.
Want to go deeper? Explore our New Hire Survival Guide to dive into Praetorian's mission, vision, values, and culture.
How to Stand Out
- Build a client‑facing security demo portfolio: Assemble a 5‑minute video or interactive repo that shows you taking a raw security problem (e.g., misconfigured AWS S3 bucket) from discovery to remediation, complete with threat model, code snippets (Python/Go), and a concise post‑mortem. Link this in your resume and be ready to walk the interviewers through the decision‑making process and impact metrics (time saved, risk reduced).
- Highlight “raw intensity” through measurable ownership: In your resume and interview, replace vague duties with concrete outcomes—e.g., “Led a cross‑functional sprint that delivered a zero‑day exploit detection pipeline in 3 weeks, cutting average detection time from 48 h to 6 h.” Use numbers, timelines, and the exact tools (Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions) to demonstrate you thrive in high‑velocity environments.
- Showcase remote collaboration fluency: Prepare a short case study of a distributed project where you used async tools (Slack threads, Notion docs, GitLab MR comments) to align stakeholders across time zones. Include screenshots or a one‑page “Collaboration Playbook” that outlines how you kept communication clear, tracked deliverables, and ensured accountability—key for Praetorian’s “fearless candor” culture.
- Prep for scenario‑based technical interviews: Expect live “client‑scenario” problems where you must design a security solution on the fly. Practice the “problem → hypothesis → experiment → result” framework using a whiteboard or shared VS Code session. Have a cheat‑sheet of Praetorian’s preferred stack (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Python, Rust) and be ready to justify trade‑offs under pressure.
- Negotiate with data on remote security engineer market rates: Research 2024 compensation benchmarks for Forward Deployed Engineers in the US (e.g., Levels.fyi, Glassdoor) and factor in Praetorian’s “performance‑first” bonus structure. When discussing salary, present a range (e.g., $150–$180 k base + 15–20 % performance bonus) backed by the data, and tie it to your proven ROI (e.g., past projects that saved $X M in breach remediation costs).
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