Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

Nuon is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own the operational success of our largest BYOC customers. You will work with the Founder, VP of Revenue, and Engineering to deploy, operate, and continuously improve dedicated Nuon control plane instances running in our enterprise customers' clouds — a deployment model we call Nuon BYOC (versus Nuon Cloud, our multi-tenant SaaS). This person is the technical owner of those installs: configuring and maintaining the Nuon BYOC app config, running migrations and upgrades, monitoring health through Datadog and our admin dashboard, executing break-glass operations when needed, and refining the runbooks our team uses to do all of the above repeatably. Think of this role as a Sales Engineer's technical depth paired with an SRE's operational instinct, pointed at a small number of high-value customers. This position is in SF and is in office in South Park. (1 mile walk from nearest BART and 1.5 mile walk from main Ferry Building) WHAT YOU WILL DO - Own Nuon installation and day-2 operations for our enterprise BYOC customers — runner upgrades, control plane migrations, version rollouts, incident response - Author and refine the runbooks, policies, and versioned actions that govern how the team operates customer BYOC environments - Maintain the Nuon BYOC app config itself — the configuration that defines how a Nuon control plane gets deployed into a customer cloud — and treat it like product code - Build and maintain Nuon app configs for customer applications during onboarding and POCs - Monitor customer environments via Datadog, our admin dashboard, and platform telemetry (runner health, workflow execution, Temporal status); respond to alerts before customers notice - Execute customer-initiated break-glass operations with the auditability and time-bound access controls our customers expect - Operate the underlying infrastructure stack — ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Temporal, control API, dashboard, runner API — well enough to triage when something misbehaves - Coordinate change windows, migrations, and rollback plans directly with customer engineering teams - Partner with the IST-based on-call team on follow-the-sun handoffs - Feed real operational pain back into the product — file bugs, write design docs, push for the right primitives instead of more runbook duct tape - Communicate and technically support customers in shared Slack channels - Contribute to Nuon's documentation and knowledge base WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - Have worked for early stage startups which means you work hard and don't act like a 9-5 job - 4+ years as a customer-facing engineer, SRE, forward deployed engineer, or implementation engineer in infrastructure and/or developer tools space - Comfortable being the technical face of Nuon to an enterprise customer's engineering team — earning trust, running an incident bridge, and explaining trade-offs - Strong Linux skills - Proficient with AI tools like Claude Code - 3+ years operating Kubernetes in production (not just demos) — debugging pods, RBAC, ingress, cluster upgrades - Proficient with AWS and at least one of Google Cloud or Azure; comfortable with all three - 2+ years with Terraform - Expertise with networking: VPCs, load balancers, ingress controllers, private connectivity - Hands-on experience with at least one of: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or Temporal in production - Bias toward writing the runbook, not just running it EXTRA CREDIT - Have run BYOC, single-tenant, or on-prem deployments for an enterprise SaaS company before - Have been a full-stack or platform engineer before moving into a customer-facing role - Have operated Temporal workflows in production - Have done SOC 2 or similar compliance work alongside customer ops - Are active and prolific on X and Hacker News about technical content ABOUT NUON Nuon is an infrastructure platform that enables software vendors to deploy and manage their applications directly into customer cloud environments — a model known as Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). Nuon gives vendors a secure, auditable architecture to manage a fleet of BYOC and single-tenant deployments, along with the day-2 operations their customers expect. This gives enterprise buyers the security, compliance, and data residency they require — without vendors having to build and maintain that infrastructure themselves.