Forward Deployed Engineer

Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be the hands-on technical expert ensuring Stack Overflow’s Professional Services engagements are executed with precision. You’ll work directly with enterprise customers to deploy, configure, and optimize Stack Internal and its integrations.

This is a customer-facing delivery role: you’ll lead deployments, integrations, and solution validation while shaping delivery playbooks, mentoring future engineers, and helping evolve our services portfolio. You’ll partner closely with customers, internal teams, and our emerging partner network to ensure every engagement is delivered on time, to spec, and with clear business impact.

What you’ll do

• Own technical delivery across multiple deployments from first prototype to stable production.
• Contribute to SOW development by documenting technical specifications, identifying dependencies and risks, and defining acceptance criteria that protect delivery timelines.
• Build and validate integrations using our API, MCP server, and Knowledge Ingestion Engine, including connecting customer knowledge sources to AI-powered developer workflows.
• Write and maintain automation scripts (Python or similar) to streamline deployment processes, data ingestion pipelines, and environment configuration.
• Troubleshoot and resolve delivery challenges in collaboration with Customer Success, Product, and Support.
• Document and scale delivery processes by creating reusable playbooks, runbooks, and automation that enable repeatable deployments across customers and partner resources.
• Mentor and guide future engineers and partner resources, raising the overall standard of delivery excellence.
• Influence service evolution by feeding client and delivery insights into the design of new offerings.

What you’ll bring

• Bring 3+ years of engineering or technical deployment experience that includes customer-facing work
• Have scoped and delivered complex systems in fast-moving or ambiguous environments
• Write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks
• Experience with enterprise integrations across developer tools like Slack, Teams, GitHub, Jira, or ServiceNow, including API-based and webhook-driven architectures.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and familiarity with containerization (Docker), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), or CI/CD pipelines.
• Working knowledge of MCP servers, RAG architectures, or enterprise AI deployment patterns. You should be able to configure and validate these workflows
• Experience with data ingestion and ETL patterns. You'll work with the Knowledge Ingestion Engine to connect diverse customer knowledge sources to Stack Internal.
• Clear written and verbal communication with both technical and business stakeholders. You'll be writing runbooks and presenting deployment status to engineering leaders.

Compensation (OTE)

$180K – $190K OTE (80% base / 20% variable)

• Base: $144K – $152K
• Variable at target: $36K – $38K

Why join now?

Stack Overflow has shaped how developers learn and solve problems for over fifteen years. That foundation of trusted knowledge is now central to how enterprises build their AI capabilities. As the first FDE on the team, you'll set the delivery standard, build the playbooks others will follow, and work directly with customers connecting their internal knowledge to the AI tools their developers use every day. For engineers who want to move to high-impact customer work, this is the role.

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