Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

What is a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer at Sherlocks AI?

A Senior Forward Deployed Engineer at Sherlocks AI is a customer-embedded engineer who owns the technical outcome of our most complex enterprise deployments.

You lead scoping, deployment, and long-term technical direction for accounts where the customer environment is genuinely novel: financial services with strict data locality requirements, healthcare with regulated audit trails, global infrastructure teams whose observability stack spans multiple clouds.

When Sherlocks AI lands a customer whose deployment might define our next quarter, you are the person on the bridge.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical scoping for our most strategic enterprise deployments. Design the deployment plan, negotiate integration scope, and own whether it succeeds.
• Embed with customer engineering leadership. You will be in the room with Directors of Reliability, VPs of Infrastructure, and CTO staff. You need to speak their language and negotiate technical scope at their level.
• Own multi-quarter deployments in novel customer environments. Design custom Sherlocks AI agents for specific failure patterns. Write custom integrations against internal tooling that has no public API.
• Own the operational performance, emergency response, and escalation path for Sherlocks AI in your customer environments. When a critical customer has a critical issue, you are usually the one deciding what escalates to the founders.
• Influence the Sherlocks AI product roadmap directly. Because you see patterns across our most sophisticated deployments, your feedback shapes what we build.
• Mentor the broader Field Engineering team. Junior and mid-level FDEs will look to you when a customer situation gets ambiguous or a deployment gets stuck.
• Represent Sherlocks AI externally. Speak at customer conferences, write technical blog posts about deployment patterns, and host webinars for prospects considering enterprise deployment.
• Travel to customer sites when it accelerates deployment. Roughly 30 percent travel expected.

You may be a good fit if you have

• 7+ years of production engineering experience. Deep SRE, platform, or infrastructure background required. You have run on-call rotations, written company-defining postmortems, and made architectural decisions that mattered.
• Strong Python and at least one systems language. Comfortable reading and modifying Sherlocks AI internals, writing production integrations, and debugging distributed systems live.
• Expert-level fluency in at least two modern observability platforms and at least two cloud providers. You have seen enough variations to recognize patterns.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise, including operators, custom resources, and cluster-level debugging under production conditions.
• Enterprise-scale customer communication skills. You can hold your own with a Fortune 500 CTO staff on questions about security posture, data residency, and multi-year architectural direction.
• High comfort with ambiguity. Strategic enterprise deployments regularly surface problems no one at Sherlocks AI has seen. You will be defining the playbook, not following one.

Why Sherlocks AI

• High growth. The customer base and the product surface are both expanding faster than the team, which is why this role exists.
• Small team. Senior Field Engineering has weekly direct time with the CEO and CTO, and no layer sits between you and the people building the product.
• High impact. The deployments you lead are the ones that define quarters, and product priorities regularly change because of what senior FDEs bring back from the field.
• Large market. Every company running production infrastructure has the incident response problem this product solves.
• Category leadership. AI SRE is being created right now, and the deployment patterns you establish here are the ones the rest of the market will copy.