{"id":463168,"url":"https://alion.io/job/apollo-research-forward-deployed-engineer-product","title":"Forward Deployed Engineer (Product)","company":{"id":178413,"name":"Apollo Research","domain":"apolloresearch.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/apollo-research","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":null},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":222000,"max":290000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":290000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SIEM","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"DLP","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-28T10:19:31Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-28","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T05:25:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":67,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":67},"description":"THE OPPORTUNITY\nWe are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. Watcher is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and multinational enterprises. Every one of those deployments involves custom engineering: integrating with the customer's coding agents and security stack, running in their cloud or on-prem environment, and tuning monitors to their workflows.\nWe are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own that work end to end. You will be the technical face of Watcher to customers across the entire lifecycle: running technical evaluations and POCs with prospects, deploying Watcher into customer environments, building the integrations and custom capabilities they need, and providing white-glove support that turns early customers into long-term partners. You are an engineer first. When a customer needs something, your default is to build it, and then to work with the product team to decide what becomes part of the core product.\nThis is truly a \"start-up role.\" You will be one of the first dedicated customer-facing engineers, you will have significant say in shaping how Apollo deploys and supports Watcher, and you can earn more responsibility quickly. As we grow, this role can develop toward leading forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or core product engineering, depending on your interests.\nKEY RESPONSIBILITIES\nDeployment and integration engineering (~40%)\nOwn customer deployments end to end: cloud, on-prem, and self-hosted backends, from architecture discussion through production rollout.\n\nBuild integrations between Watcher and customer environments: coding agent setups (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), SIEM and security operations tooling, identity and access systems, CI/CD pipelines.\n\nConfigure and tune monitors, policies, and permissions for each customer's workflows, and validate that monitoring quality holds on their real traffic.\n\nDebug issues in environments you don't control, often under time pressure, and drive them to resolution with the product team.\n\nPre-sales and technical evaluation (~30%)\nRun technical evaluations and POCs with prospects: scope the pilot, deploy Watcher on their agent traffic, and demonstrate concrete value (caught failures, security coverage, developer experience).\n\nServe as the technical counterpart to security and engineering leaders during evaluations: answer architecture and security questions, run demos on the prospect's actual use cases rather than canned examples.\n\nWork with our AI Security & Control Engineer on security questionnaires, architecture reviews, and customer pen-test support during procurement.\n\nFeed honest signal back into the team about why deals progress or stall technically.\n\nWhite-glove support and product feedback (~30%)\nBe the named technical contact for key customers. Own their escalations, incident communication, and feature requests.\n\nBuild customer-specific capabilities where warranted, and drive the \"should this be product?\" conversation with the Engineering Manager and product engineers so one-off work compounds into the roadmap.\n\nTurn deployment experience into leverage: documentation, deployment tooling, and runbooks that make every subsequent deployment faster and less bespoke.\n\nRepresent the voice of the customer in planning: you will know better than anyone what real security and platform teams need from Watcher.\n\nREPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS\nLand a lighthouse enterprise: Run a POC for a large enterprise with a strict security posture: scope the pilot with their security team, stand up a self-hosted backend inside their infrastructure, integrate with their SIEM, tune monitors on their traffic, and present results that convert the pilot into a production contract.\n\nBuild a reusable deployment path: After your first several deployments, turn the bespoke steps into a repeatable, documented, partially automated deployment package (infrastructure templates, integration modules, validation checks) that cuts time-to-production for new customers by more than half.\n\nShip a customer-driven capability into the product: Take a recurring customer request (e.g. a custom alert routing scheme or a new agent integration), build it for the customer who needs it, generalize it with the product team, and ship it as a core Watcher feature.\n\nRescue a wobbly account: A customer's monitors are noisy, their engineers are annoyed, and their security lead is questioning the renewal. Diagnose the root causes of their traffic, retune the configuration, fix the underlying issues with the product team, and win back their confidence.\n\nJOB REQUIREMENTS\nMust-haves\nStrong engineering foundation. 3+ years building and shipping production software. You can work across the stack (Python and TypeScript primarily), read unfamiliar code fast, and are comfortable with cloud infrastructure, networking basics, and deployment tooling. You will regularly build under constraints you don't choose, in environments you don't control.\n\nGenuinely good with customers. You communicate clearly with both hands-on engineers and security leadership, you stay calm and constructive when something is on fire, and customers come away trusting you. This is not a tolerance requirement; you should like this part of the job.\n\nHigh agency and ownership. When a customer is blocked, you don't wait for a ticket to be routed. You find the problem, fix it or escalate it with a proposed solution, and follow through until it's resolved.\n\nStartup pace. You are excited about a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to grind when it matters, including occasionally at customer-driven hours.\n\nJudgment on custom vs. core. You can tell the difference between a request worth building bespoke, a request that should become a product, and a request to push back on, and you can deliver that pushback to a customer gracefully.\n\nStrong written communication. Deployment docs, incident updates, and POC reports need to be clear and precise.\n\nComfortable leveraging AI heavily for engineering and customer work, while holding the output to a high standard.\n\nStrong nice-to-haves\nPrior FDE, solutions engineering, or professional services experience, especially at a developer-tools, security, or infrastructure company.\n\nExperience deploying software into enterprise environments: on-prem, VPC deployments, SSO/identity integration, security reviews, procurement processes.\n\nFamiliarity with the enterprise security stack (SIEM, DLP, endpoint tooling) and with how security teams evaluate vendors.\n\nExperience with coding agents as a power user or builder. You have used Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools heavily, or built agent tooling yourself.\n\nPre-sales exposure: you have run POCs or technical evaluations and know how to demonstrate value on a prospect's terms.\n\nWillingness to travel occasionally to customer sites.\n\nExplicitly not required\nFormal AI safety background. We need excellent customer-facing engineers who can learn the AI safety context.\n\nSales experience or quota history. You support deals technically; you don't carry a number.\n\nDeep expertise in every technology we use. We care about demonstrated ability to learn fast in unfamiliar environments, which is the core skill of this job.\n\nWe want to emphasize that people who feel they don’t fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position, nonetheless, are strongly encouraged to apply.\nBENEFITS\nThis role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.\n\nSalary: San Francisco: $222,000 - $290,000; London: £149,000 - £195,000. We will be looking to meaningfully raise salaries soon.\n\nOur engineers effectively have an unlimited token budget. If a better result costs more compute, use it.\n\nFlexible work hours and schedule\n\nUnlimited vacation\n\nUnlimited sick leave\n\nUp to 6 months of paid parental leave\n\nComprehensive health, dental and vision insurance\n\nRetirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)\n\nLunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays\n\nPaid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences\n\nA yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget\n\nRelocation support and visa fees (if applicable)\n\nLOGISTICS\nTime Allocation: Full-time\n\nLocation: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office, with occasional travel to customer sites. We offer flexible working hours and some wfh arrangements.\n\nVisa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. 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