Forward Deployed Engineer
full-time•San Francisco
About this role
About the role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) in Cyberhaven’s R&D organization, you will embed deeply with enterprise customers deploying Cyberhaven’s Content Inspection (CI) stack in their own cloud or datacenter environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes). You operate where real customer environments meet product engineering—turning complex deployments, failures, and edge cases into concrete product and reliability improvements.This role is hands-on, highly technical, and outward-facing. You are part of R&D, and will partner with SRE, Sales Engineering, Professional Services, and Customer Support to accelerate successful customer outcomes while strengthening CI’s architecture, operability, and scalability as DSPM on-prem connectors become the norm.
What you’ll do
Act as an R&D owner for customer deployments of on-prem and hybrid Content Inspection (CI), ensuring real-world requirements inform product behavior and roadmap decisions.
Work directly with customers to architect, deploy, and validate CI in production environments, including Kubernetes, Helm, networking, security, and performance considerations.
Lead investigation of complex customer issues by reproducing them in lab or test clusters, either delivering fixes or driving them to resolution within R&D.
Serve as a technical point of contact for high-severity CI incidents, joining customer bridges and coordinating resolution across R&D, SRE, and Customer Support.
Partner with SRE on reliability, capacity planning, upgrade safety, and operational readiness for on-prem CI.
Collaborate with Sales Engineering during late-stage evaluations and technical deep dives to ensure CI can meet customer architecture, scale, and security requirements.
Co-lead deployments and upgrades with Professional Services, validating prerequisites, reviewing configurations, and shaping best practices for repeatable success.
Act as the R&D point person for DSPM on-prem connectors, supporting design partners, validating new capabilities, and enabling large-scale customer rollouts.
Drive product improvements by owning feedback related to diagnostics, observability, configuration safety, upgrade/rollback behavior, and supportability.
Create internal design notes, runbooks, and technical documentation that bridge customer reality and engineering intent.
Participate in design reviews, release readiness, and post-incident retrospectives to ensure customer learnings are captured and acted on.
Who you are
3+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Production Engineering, SRE, or customer-facing roles embedded within an R&D or product engineering organization.
Deep, hands-on experience with Linux, containers, and Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS, or self-managed clusters).
Experience delivering and operating on-prem or hybrid enterprise software, including Kubernetes platforms and virtual appliances.
Strong understanding of enterprise networking and security (TLS, DNS, load balancers, proxies, firewalls).
Skilled at debugging distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces, and comfortable navigating unfamiliar systems quickly.
Confident working directly with enterprise customers on architecture discussions, deployments, and high-severity incidents.
Product-minded: you naturally turn customer friction into actionable engineering improvements.
Clear communicator who can operate across engineering, go-to-market, and customer-facing teams.
Joining Cyberhaven is a chance to revolutionize data security. Traditional tools fall short, but we’ve reimagined protection with AI-enabled data lineage that analyzes billions of workflows to understand data, detect risk, and stop threats. Backed by $250M from leading investors like Khosla and Redpoint, our team includes leaders who built industry-defining technologies at CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Meta, Google, and more. This role lets you shape the future of data security, alongside experts driven to help customers protect their most valuable information.
Cyberhaven is committed to creating a diverse environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
What you'll do
- The Forward Deployed Engineer will act as an R&D owner for customer deployments, ensuring that real-world requirements inform product behavior. They will also lead investigations of complex customer issues and serve as a technical point of contact for high-severity incidents.
About Cyberhaven
Cyberhaven makes data security smarter, faster, and easier by:
- Understanding data flows: Know where data came from, how it was used, and who interacted with it – automatically with data lineage.
- Aligning protection with purpose: Allow workflows that make sense. Block only those that indicate actual risk.
- Empowering people, not punishing them: Educate in the moment, elevate awareness, and intercept risky actions without hurting productivity.
- Reducing noise for security teams: Focus on the incidents that matter, not thousands of false alarms.
- Resolving incidents faster: Rapidly understand critical issues, get concise overviews, receive actionable remediations, and access comprehensive evidence for thorough investigations.
- Simplifying management: Use one solution to manage policies, prevent data loss, and identify insider risk.
This is not another clunky, overcomplicated set of rules.
This is Reimagined DLP and Insider Threat: Data security that powers innovation.
Ready to join Cyberhaven?
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does a Forward Deployed Engineer do at Cyberhaven?
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Cyberhaven, you will: the Forward Deployed Engineer will act as an R&D owner for customer deployments, ensuring that real-world requirements inform product behavior. They will also lead investigations of complex customer issues and serve as a technical point of contact for high-severity incidents..
Is the Forward Deployed Engineer position at Cyberhaven remote?
The Forward Deployed Engineer position at Cyberhaven is based in San Francisco, United States. Contact the company through Clera for specific work arrangement details.
How do I apply for the Forward Deployed Engineer position at Cyberhaven?
You can apply for the Forward Deployed Engineer position at Cyberhavendirectly through Clera. Click the "Apply Now" button above to start your application. Clera's AI-powered platform will help match your profile with this opportunity and guide you through the application process.