Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

About Opal Security: At Opal, we’re building modern identity governance for the AI era—intelligent access management that empowers enterprises to move fast while staying secure. Our mission is to bring clarity, control, and confidence to complex enterprise environments, helping teams govern access without slowing down innovation. About the Role: Identity is having a moment. Every company is deploying agents, spinning up service accounts, and realizing their IAM stack can't keep up. We're building AI-native security that scales with this chaos and companies like Databricks and Figma are betting on us to get it right. You will be the technical bridge between Opal and our customers. You'll embed with prospects and customers during critical moments; sales cycles, implementations, expansions, and build whatever it takes to get them across the finish line. That might mean prototyping a custom integration, architecting their deployment, debugging their environment, or writing code that becomes part of our product. You'll own the technical relationship, which means you get to be creative, challenge assumptions, and build trust through deep expertise. Please note: We've built a team that works exceptionally well together and has fun doing so. We're looking to bring on new teammates who will both add to and grow with what we're building 🙂 Your Responsibilities: - Lead technical conversations in sales cycles, design solutions that map to customer needs, and remove technical blockers that stand between interest and contract. - Write code for customer-specific integrations, proof-of-concepts, and implementations. Some of this becomes productized, some stays one-off. - Contribute your best ideas to the Opal product, scale your solutions for all customers, and leverage your experience in the field to contribute to Opal's product roadmap. - Drive implementations from kickoff to production, troubleshoot issues in customer environments, and ensure technical stakeholders become champions of Opal. - Surface patterns from customer conversations that should influence roadmap, document what you learn, and help engineering prioritize what matters most to revenue. Our Ideal Candidate Loves to: - You genuinely enjoy being in rooms (virtual or physical) with customers. You ask good questions, listen well, and can read the room to know when to go deep vs. stay high-level. - You can write production-quality code across the stack, but you also know when duct tape is the right answer. You optimize for unblocking the customer, not architectural purity. - No two weeks look the same. You might be debugging a Terraform module on Monday, demoing to a CISO on Tuesday, and building a Slack integration on Wednesday. - You don't need a manager to tell you what to do. You hear a customer problem, figure out what would solve it, and make it happen. - You can translate "we need to prove ROI to the board" into technical requirements, and explain "we need to refactor our RBAC engine" in terms a VP of Sales understands. BENEFITS & PERKS - Competitive Salary - Early employee equity - Top-tier Medical, Vision, & Dental coverage - Company and team bonding trips throughout the year fully covered by Opal Security - Daily lunch & coffee allowance - Unlimited PTO - 11 company holidays - One Medical Membership - 401k plan - Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits This role is based in San Francisco. Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds rarely apply unless they meet all the job criteria. We aren’t looking for someone who ticks every single box on a page; we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. If you think you’d be a great fit, then please get in touch to tell us about yourself. Opal is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.