Forward Deployed Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 14, 2026.
The Basics
We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (m/f/d) to join us as the embedded technical expert who takes our customers from "interested in AI" to running real agentic workflows in production.
This is a hands-on, code-shipping role, not an advisory one. You'll work directly inside a customer's environment - understanding their domain, their data, and the business outcomes that matter to them - and build the agentic use cases (using MCPs, skills, and our agent platform) that make those outcomes real. You'll also bring a working understanding of Kubernetes, since our platform is built and operated on it, but that's the foundation you stand on, not the focus of the role.
Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products - this role is core to how we do that with our agent platform.
Your Job
You partner directly with a customer as their embedded expert - not just advising, but designing, building, and shipping working agentic solutions in their environment.
You get up to speed on a new customer's domain quickly (e.g. smart manufacturing, financial services, whatever it is) and identify the business outcomes AI/agentic workflows can realistically deliver for them.
You design and build proof-of-concepts and production-track agentic workflows using MCPs, skills, and our agent platform, tailored to that customer's data and systems.
You act as the customer-side expert on what our agent platform can do - translating platform capability into something their engineers can actually use and extend.
You work closely with customer engineering teams - some devrel-style enablement, workshops, and pairing so they can own what you build after you move on.
You feed the patterns and gaps you find back to the product team, shaping what we build next.
You may support pre-sales conversations - helping scope what AI use cases would deliver value for a prospect, and building examples that help make the case for choosing Giant Swarm.
Requirements
You have practical, hands-on experience in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Architect, Forward Deployed Engineer, or similar).
You have real, hands-on experience building with agentic AI - MCPs, agent frameworks, tool-using LLMs, or similar. This is non-negotiable.
You can get productive in an unfamiliar business domain fast, and turn what you learn into concrete technical solutions.
You have at least a solid working understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native operations.
You communicate clearly and confidently with both customer stakeholders and engineers - this role lives at that interface.
Experience with developer relations, workshops, or technical enablement is a strong plus, as is prior Solutions Architect experience.
You're comfortable with ambiguity - this is our first hire fully dedicated to agentic customer work, so a lot of the "how" is still being defined as you go.
You are able to comfortably align parts of your workday with Europe (UTC +/- 2 hours).
Salary Information
We're a fully remote company and use a formula-based salary calculator to determine starting salaries, factoring in location, experience, and responsibility. This approach helps us avoid pay gaps (e.g., gender pay gap) by basing compensation on objective criteria rather than negotiation. Because we apply a location factor, the actual figure for hires outside Cologne will differ from the reference range above, and the total package may include components beyond base salary (e.g., equity, benefits). We're publishing this range to comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Your recruiter will walk you through how the calculator applies to your location and level.
Salary Range: €70,000 - €100,000
About us
Every new team member changes the team. We love to learn from each other and we are looking for people who know things we don't.
Becoming part of Giant Swarm means that, by extension, you also become part of the Cloud Native community. We actively contribute to upstream projects and our quarterly hackathons will give you space to work on out-of-the-box projects. Occasionally, when we, as a team, want to fully focus on one project, we scratch all meetings and routines for a certain time to better focus during our hive-sprints.
Continuous learning is important to us - we foster this through bi-yearly personal development talks, a budget for training/certifications/coaching as well as regular feedback talks and workshops. Our teams are cross- functional and collaboration is key.
Nothing crazy, but useful Basics: We currently operate on a 32 hour workweek (or 4 day workweek, you decide!). We don't count holidays but set a minimum number; You choose your own hard- and software; As a company that has almost, if not more, kids than employees, family-friendliness is crucial to us and paid parental leave is a no-brainer; We pay monthly perks that cover your costs for working remotely; We meet twice a year as an entire company and (if possible) see conferences as an important place to catch up with team members; We aim to be fully transparent (finance, salaries) unless it hurts people and trust you, based on this to make the best decisions
A note on the use of AI in our hiring process: real people read every application, no AI screening, no automated filters. We build tools, we use tools, we get excited about tools. We also know better than most that the best ones change what's possible. What we're looking for is how you really think, what you've built, and how you see the world. Using AI is fine - just don't miss the chance to let us get to know you. After all, humans are way more fun to meet at our onsites!
We failed in exactly describing our way to approach important company elements that can be described with 'buzzwords' such as agile mindset, cross-functional teams, self-organization, value of the individual or trust & teamwork. However, we truly care about them, we live them and we constantly iterate on them. Some snippets about how we do this are posted in our blog but by far not all of them.
Important note: We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age. When you apply for a role at Giant Swarm, we will also consider you for other relevant roles, or ones that may come up in future if this one isn't a good fit at this time.