{"id":4284367,"url":"https://alion.io/job/betterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer","title":"Principal Forward Deployed Engineer","company":{"id":171735,"name":"BetterUp","domain":"betterup.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/betterup-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Austin, United States","San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","Arlington, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":230000,"max":320000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":320000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A2A","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Microsoft Teams","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Slack","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-13T17:01:29Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-13","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T21:20:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Let's face it, a company whose mission is human transformation better have some fresh thinking about the employer/employee relationship.\nWe do. We can't cram it all in here, but you'll start noticing it from the first interview.\nEven 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.\nThis makes for a remarkably focused and fulfilling work experience. Frankly, it's not for everyone. But for people with fire in their belly, it's a game-changing, career-defining, soul-lifting move.\nJoin us and we promise you the most intense and fulfilling years of your career, doing life-changing work in a fun, inventive, soulful culture.\nIf that sounds exciting-and the job description below feels like a fit-we really should start talking.\nWe are a hybrid company with a focus on in-person collaboration when necessary. Employees are expected to be available to work from one of our office hubs at least two days per week, or eight days per month. Our US hub locations include: Austin, TX; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; and the Washington, DC metro area. If this is a role based in Europe, our Europe hub locations are London, UK and Amsterdam, NL. Please ensure you can realistically commit to this structure before applying.\nThe Opportunity\nAI is changing how every person in the world works. It's a new Industrial Revolution, and almost all of the attention is on the technology. Far less is going to the people who have to change how they work to use it.\nWe think helping people through that change is one of the most important problems in the world right now. Even the most technically advanced companies are struggling to get their workforces productive with AI, and our research shows much of the gap comes down to mindset and behavior, which can be coached. Coaching used to be something a company could afford only for its top leaders. With AI and human coaches working together, we can reach everyone, and the most iconic companies in the world are asking us to build that with them.\nOur largest customers no longer decide on the demo. They decide on what happens after: whether their HR systems connect, whether provisioning works, whether coaching shows up inside the tools their people already have open, whether our AI behaves the way their risk team needs it to. Forward Deployment is the function that owns that work.\nThis role sets the technical architecture for Forward Deployment. Our largest customers are asking for the same few things in different words: the coach inside their own assistant, their data in their own lake, an AI deployment their governance committee will sign. Today we solve each of those one account at a time. You decide what the shared pattern is, build the first version on the hardest account, and make it what every squad uses and what the core platform eventually absorbs.\nThe accounts are specific. One customer wants our coach answering inside the agent platform it is rolling out to its whole workforce. Another is building its own experience layer on top of ours and needs an architecture where each experience is a declarative object instead of a custom build. A third signed, and then its AI governance committee asked how its data is hosted, whether it trains a model, and what happens under a legal hold.\nYou'll do this as a hands-on engineer, with squads of engineers and PMs around you, and you'll be the engineer we put in front of a customer's CTO, chief architect, or CISO when the technical answer decides the deal.\nWhat You Own\nSet 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.\n\nDecide 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.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nWrite 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.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nBuild 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.\n\nCarry 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.\n\nKeep building. You write code on the hardest problems yourself, and the first version of every shared pattern is yours.\n\nRaise 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.\n\nWhat You'll Bring\n10+ years building and shipping production software, including several years as the technical owner of systems deployed inside large enterprises.\n\nA record of leading the technical side of customer deployments where the contract value ran into seven or eight figures.\n\nArchitecture 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.\n\nProduction 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.\n\nCredibility 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.\n\nA record of turning one-off customer work into platform capability, and of killing the work that didn't deserve it.\n\nExperience with agent protocols (MCP, A2A) or building inside Microsoft Teams, Copilot, or Slack is a plus.\n\nDomain expertise in organizational transformation, human transformation, or talent intelligence is a plus.\n\nSkills & Competencies\nRelentless 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.\n\nArchitectural judgment under ambiguity. You pick the simplest design that survives the customer's constraints, and you can say what would make you change it.\n\nThe 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.\n\nJudgment 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.\n\nExecutive 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.\n\nAI-native fluency. Building with agents is your default operating method, and you set the practices the rest of the team builds with.\n\nComfort 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.\n\nPreferred Backgrounds\nSenior forward deployed engineers and deployment leads from companies that run this model, who have owned the architecture across several accounts.\n\nStaff and principal engineers or architects from enterprise platforms in identity, HR technology, or data, who know how large customers' systems behave once they're deployed.\n\nFounders, CTOs, and founding engineers who sold into large enterprises and carried the security review themselves.\n\nApplied AI leads who have put agent or LLM systems into production at large companies and answered for how they behaved.\n\nWhy This Role\nHelping people adapt while AI changes how work gets done is one of the most important problems in the world right now. You'll work on it across entire workforces at many of the world's largest employers, a bigger scale than any one company's internal team gets.\n\nYou set the architecture for a function our executive team has named as its expansion lever, on the accounts where the technical answer decides the outcome.\n\nYour work sits on the critical path of decisions worth millions of dollars, and you'll know within a quarter whether it moved them.\n\nYou'll build for some of the largest companies in the world, in their environment, with their engineers and architects. Nobody stands between you and the customer. If that's not appealing, this isn't the right role.\n\nThe custom work has somewhere to go. A monthly graduation board with core engineering decides what becomes a platform capability, and you're the one making the technical case.\n\nThe problems are current. Agent-to-agent integration, enterprise AI governance, and evaluating how a coach behaves across tens of thousands of people are open problems, and you'll work on them with customers who need answers this quarter.\n\nForward Deployment is a young function with unwritten rules. The person in this seat writes the technical ones.\n\nAI at BetterUp\nOur team thrives at the intersection of human expertise and AI capability. As an AI-forward company, adaptation and continuous learning are part of our daily work. We're looking for teammates who are excited to evolve alongside technology - people who experiment boldly, share their discoveries openly, and help define best practices for AI-augmented work. These professionals thoughtfully integrate AI into their work to deliver exceptional results while maintaining the human judgment and creativity that drives real innovation.\nBenefits:\nAt BetterUp, we are committed to living out our mission every day and that starts with providing benefits that allow our employees to care for themselves, support their families, and give back to their community.\nAccess to BetterUp coaching; one for you and one for a friend or family member\n\nA competitive compensation plan with opportunity for advancement\n\nMedical, dental, and vision insurance\n\nFlexible paid time off\n\nPer year:\nAll federal/statutory holidays observed\n\n4 BetterUp Inner Workdays (https://www.betterup.co/inner-work)\n\n5 Volunteer Days to give back\n\nCompany wide Summer & Winter breaks\n\nYear-round charitable contribution of your choice on behalf of BetterUp\n\n401(k) self contribution\n\nWe are dedicated to building diverse teams that fuel an authentic workplace and sense of belonging for each and every employee. We know applying for a job can be intimidating, please don’t hesitate to reach out - we encourage everyone interested in joining us to apply.\nBetterUp Inc. provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to...","description_format":"text","description_chars":13558,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning","Equity","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Coaching & Mentoring"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-13T21:20:13Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 3 · green card filings: 1","filings_12m":3,"filings_prev_12m":5,"green_card_filings_12m":1,"median_offered_wage_usd":232500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-12T07:36:15+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":63,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-13T23:05:55Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":320000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/betterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/betterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-13T23:05:55Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":45996,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":171735},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=171735"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbetterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbetterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbetterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/betterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbetterup-principal-forward-deployed-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4284367}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"betterup.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4284367},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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