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

Forward Deployed Engineer

  • Full-time
  • Remote
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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

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Defakto, you will be the technical expert helping enterprise customers deploy and scale our non-human identity and access management platform. Our customers face complex challenges across different infrastructure environments. By providing solutions, you will aid customer retention and expansion, and help shape our product roadmap. 

This position will require international travel to work on-site, at least four times per year.

Key responsibilities

  • Assist with enterprise deployments of our self-hosted solution, resolving integration challenges across systems running on-premises, in multi-cloud environments, and in edge locations
  • Conduct technical investigations to diagnose customer issues by analyzing distributed system behaviors
  • Author and maintain publicly available code libraries
  • Identify customer-specific success metrics and design dashboards to track adoption progress
  • Create technical documentation, working demonstrations, tutorials, and video content 
  • Deliver training presentations and technical deep-dives to engineering teams and executives
  • Document customer architecture and requirements to inform product development
  • Translate customer feedback into product improvements, either by adding features or fixing bugs

Required qualifications

  • Relentless curiosity about customers, their business problems, and the technical challenges they face
  • 5+ years implementing enterprise cloud solutions, with DevOps experience
  • Experience deploying Kubernetes workloads
  • Linux administration and troubleshooting in production environments
  • Proficiency in scripting (Python, Bash) and familiarity with systems languages (e.g. Go, Rust, C++, Java)
  • Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (e.g. AWS, Azure, or GCP). This should include secure-by-default IAM, networking, and secret management.
  • Proven software design, technical writing and presentation skills

Preferred skills

  • Understanding of container security, PKI, and identity management systems
  • Open-source SPIRE implementation experience
  • Go programming experience, with a focus on security application
  • Multi-cloud architecture and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
  • Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government)