Forward Deployed Engineer
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: Palo Alto
Department: Engineering Travel Provider
Location Type: HYBRID
Employment Type: FULL_TIME
Who: You! Embedded at the intersection of Engineering and our most strategic enterprise customers, working hand-in-hand with internal teams across SRE, DevOps, and Product Engineering.
What: A rare opportunity for a deeply technical engineer who thrives in dynamic, customer-facing environments. Someone who can dive into a complex platform issue, identify root cause, and drive resolution across internal teams, all while being the trusted technical face to enterprise customers.
When: ASAP! We are looking to hire and onboard as soon as we find the right person. Exciting work awaits!
Where: Our office hub in Palo Alto, CA. You will be required to be in office 1+ days per week in alignment with our office work policy.
Why: As Spotnana scales its enterprise tier, each Forward Deployed Engineer is dedicated to a set of strategic accounts, owning the technical relationship end-to-end. This is not a support role. It's a high-trust, high-autonomy engineering position that sits at the edge of our platform and our customers' most critical operations.
How (to land the job!): The process begins with a technical assessment designed to showcase your engineering depth. Candidates who move forward will have a conversation with our Talent Acquisition team, followed by live collaboration with a panel of engineers and hiring managers. The process is subject to change.
The day-to-day:
- Own the technical relationship for a portfolio of strategic enterprise accounts — serving as the primary engineering point of contact from onboarding through steady-state operations
- Investigate and drive resolution of complex platform issues spanning API integrations, webhook delivery, data consistency, and performance — working directly with SRE, DevOps, and Product Engineering to close the loop fast
- Translate customer environments and integration patterns into clear internal context, enabling engineering teams to prioritize, reproduce, and fix issues with minimal back-and-forth
- Embed with customers during critical moments — go-lives, migrations, and incident response — providing real-time technical guidance and keeping stakeholders informed with calm, accurate communication
- Identify recurring friction points across accounts and advocate for platform improvements, feeding structured signal back into the product and engineering roadmap
- Build and maintain integration runbooks, escalation playbooks, and technical reference docs that reduce time-to-resolution and scale knowledge across the team
Skills & qualities we value:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with hands-on depth in distributed systems, REST APIs, webhooks, and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- Strong debugging instincts — comfortable reading logs, tracing requests across services, and forming hypotheses without a complete picture
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers or partners in a technical capacity, with the credibility to lead conversations at both the engineering and stakeholder level
- Ability to context-switch fluidly between deep technical investigation and clear written or verbal communication
- Familiarity with observability tooling (Datadog, PagerDuty, or similar) and the discipline to instrument, monitor, and escalate proactively
- A bias toward ownership — you don't wait for someone to hand you a ticket, you find the problem, assemble the right people, and drive it to done
- Comfort operating in ambiguity at a scaling company, where processes are still being built and your judgment fills the gaps
Let’s talk compensation
Spotnana strives to offer fair, industry-competitive, and equitable compensation. Our approach holistically assesses total compensation, including cash (salary + annual performance bonus), company equity, and comprehensive benefits. Our market-based compensation approach uses data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set salary ranges that are thoughtful and consistent with the role, industry, company size, and internal equity of our team. Each employee is paid within the minimum and maximum of their position’s compensation range based on their skills, experience, qualifications, and other job-related specifications.
The base salary range for this role is $143,000 - $175,000 per year.
We care for the people who make everything possible - our benefits offerings include:
- Equity in the form of stock options which provides partial ownership in the company so you can share in the success of the company as it grows
- Pre-tax and ROTH 401(k) options via Fidelity with up to a 4% company match
- Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability effective on your hire date. We cover 100% of your employee premiums and 85% of your eligible dependents
- Pre-tax flexible spending account options for health, dependent care and commuter expenses
- Flexible PTO in addition to 10 company holidays, and an end-of-year company shutdown
- Up to 26 weeks of Parental Leave
- Monthly cell phone / internet stipend
- Additional benefits including access to RocketLawyer’s online legal platform, International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) membership, Pet Insurance through Fetch, Financial Wellness through Origin and SoFi, EAP through Mutual of Omaha, The Calm app through Kaiser, pre-tax parking/transit program and more
