Join Our Team in Securing the Future — One Identity at a Time

Field Engineer

  • Full-time
  • US/Canada preferred
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About Defakto

Defakto is building the first complete Non-Human Identity (NHI) and Access Management platform. Non-human identities (services, machines, CI/CD pipelines, and now AI agents) already outnumber human ones by an order of magnitude, and almost all of them authenticate with static credentials and overprivileged service accounts that nobody discovers, rotates, or governs. That is the problem we exist to solve: give every non-human actor a real, dynamic, cryptographically verifiable identity instead of a shared secret.

We raised a $30.75M Series B in late 2025 (led by XYZ Venture Capital, with The General Partnership, Bloomberg Beta, WndrCo, and J.P. Morgan), bringing total funding to roughly $50M. As enterprises race into the agentic era, every new AI agent is one more non-human identity that needs to be issued, scoped, and audited, which is exactly why NHI has become a board-level security problem and why we exist to solve it.

The Role

The Field Engineering role is a senior technical voice that Defakto puts in front of customers, partners, and the industry. You’ll work alongside the VP of Product in strategic customer conversations, represent Defakto at the standards bodies and conferences that shape the identity security space, and help the market understand why what we’re building matters.

Think: An evangelist who can teach the industry — someone who speaks at conferences, publishes, influences how practitioners think about workload identity and non-human identity security, and can walk into a CISO briefing at a Fortune 100 and command the room.

What You’ll Do

  • Own the technical narrative externally — represent Defakto at conferences (Black Hat, Identiverse, IETF, etc.), in podcasts, and in published content; shape how the industry understands non-human identity security
  • Engage at the CISO and engineering level — comfortable discussing business value to executive leadership down to solutions specific dialogue with technologists 
  • Drive standards influence — participate in SPIFFE/SPIRE, OAuth, and adjacent standards bodies; build Defakto’s credibility as the company that defines the category, not just sells into it
  • Support strategic partnerships — be the technical face in AWS, CrowdStrike, and other partner conversations; help shape “powered by” positioning and co-sell narratives
  • Accelerate deals — join late-stage enterprise sales cycles as the senior technical authority; unblock security questionnaires, architecture reviews, and CISO sign-off
  • Build the Customer Advisory Board — identify and cultivate technical champions at strategic accounts (Walmart, Bloomberg, CVS, ARM) who can speak publicly to Defakto’s value
  • Feed product strategy — translate field signal — what CISOs are asking, what competitors are doing, what the standards community is debating — into product direction


What We’re Looking For

  • Deep technical background in identity security — workload identity, auth/authz, SPIFFE/SPIRE, non-human identity, or adjacent domains; you’ve built or architected systems in this space
  • Established presence in the security or identity community — conference speaking, published content, standards participation, or recognized thought leadership
  • Experience engaging at the CISO and executive level — you’ve run executive briefings, navigated complex org politics, and earned trust with senior security buyers
  • Comfort operating in a pre-sales and advisory capacity — you understand how enterprise security deals are won and what it takes to be the technical authority in the room
  • Strong written and verbal communication — you can write a blog post that practitioners share and give a keynote that practitioners remember

Nice to Have

  • Background in the CTO office or as a Field CTO / Principal Architect at a security or cloud infrastructure company
  • Active participation in SPIFFE, OAuth, or related standards bodies
  • Relationships with CISOs and security architects at Fortune 500 companies — particularly in finance, retail, or healthcare
  • Experience with agentic AI security or non-human identity — this is where the market is moving and where our roadmap is focused
  • Ability to build POCs and prototype solutions — not a full-time coder, but technically hands-on enough to demonstrate concepts with customers
  • Can operate independently and is highly adaptable within a startup environment