Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

• Diagnose and resolve technical failures blocking customer deployments
• Act as the technical escalation point for Technical Account Managers and Customer Success Engineers
• Ship production Golang code to resolve root causes uncovered during debugging
• Build proof-of-concept environments using Bash and Terraform
• Set day-to-day priorities and assignments for deployment ops engineers
• Participate in a formal on-call rotation with defined SLAs

Requirements

• Experience debugging distributed, multi-service cloud architectures in live customer environments
• Expertise troubleshooting TLS/mTLS at the protocol level, including certificate chain validation and handshake failures
• Production experience with certificate-based authentication, VPNs, enterprise Wi-Fi/EAP-TLS, RADIUS, SSH, or OAuth
• Experience developing and shipping production Golang code
• Ability to own technical escalations directly with customers

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with certificate enrollment protocols such as SCEP and ACME DA
• PKI experience across macOS, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS
• Experience with hardware-backed security mechanisms like Yubikeys, TPMs, HSMs, or secure enclaves
• Prior experience in customer-facing technical roles such as Forward Deployed or Solutions Engineering

About the Company

Smallstep is an internationally distributed, remote-first company providing a device identity platform to secure network-based communications.