Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding FDE

New York (hybrid)

Competitive package including meaningful equity

You've run someone else's playbook before. This time, you write it.

This well-funded startup is taking a different route to FedRAMP. It delivers compliance as a fully managed, agentic service: no dashboard, no software demo, no "here's your login." Instead, engineers embed inside the customer's own environment and do the actual work of getting every control from red to green. Think Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineer model, rebuilt for cybersecurity compliance.

It's early. It's backed by an eight-figure pre-seed round from top-tier venture investors. And it's already building customer pipeline. That's the good problem to have, and it's exactly why this role exists right now.

The founders know what they're doing. The CEO spent over a decade building and running his last company. His co-founder is a security engineer out of Israeli military intelligence who has built product at two cybersecurity companies. The company runs from New York and Tel Aviv, and you'd work alongside the CEO in the New York office.

The role

You'd be the Founding Engineer in this function. There's no team to inherit; you build what comes next. You run the first customer engagements yourself, hands on keyboard, and prove the model works. Then you help hire and coach the FDEs who follow. From there, you take it to the next market, and the one after that. The playbook doesn't exist yet. You're the one writing it.

What you'll actually be doing

• Getting inside customer environments and closing gaps yourself, A to Z: pipelines, cloud, identity, endpoint and device management (Okta, CrowdStrike, JumpCloud territory)
• Driving every Key Security Indicator (KSI) to green, no matter how red it starts
• Taking customers all the way through FedRAMP 20x authorization, side by side
• Turning what you learn in the field into the company's first real FDE playbook
• Helping hire and coach the FDEs who come after you
• Working directly with the founders. No layers, no politics, no waiting for sign-off

Who we're looking for

Someone with real DevSecOps depth: you've built and hardened pipelines yourself, not just reviewed someone else's. You close gaps end to end without handing off halfway, and you don't stop until every indicator is green. You can take a customer through FedRAMP 20x, and the KSI model makes sense to you. Ideally you've lived the forward deployed life, at Palantir or somewhere close. You're still hands-on and still hungry, not looking to trade the field for a title. And you're comfortable that there's no dashboard, no team and no manual yet, because building all three is the job.

Why this, why now

You get ground-floor equity in a company whose demand problem is "too much," not "not enough." That's a signal most pre-seed pitches can't honestly make. You work directly with a founder who has built, scaled and exited a company before. You help shape how continuous compliance actually gets done, instead of executing someone else's roadmap. And there's a real, near-term path from doing the work yourself to owning the function as it scales coast to coast.

Trident Search are a specialist search firm, deeply embedded in the cyber security ecosystem across North America and Europe. We support high-growth vendors at every stage of their journey - from critical first hires and leadership appointments through to building entire teams at scale.