Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Forward Deployed Engineer roles sit at a key seam in modern SaaS, where product engineering meets real enterprise infrastructure. This listing is notable because it centers on deploying a core content inspection stack into customer-controlled environments across major clouds and Kubernetes, reflecting how many security SaaS vendors now win deals through hybrid and on premises readiness rather than pure multi tenant delivery.
For a SaaS career, the work builds rare leverage: translating production constraints, incident patterns, and deployment friction into concrete reliability and product changes inside R&D. That combination of customer proximity and engineering ownership tends to sharpen judgment around operability, upgrade safety, observability, and repeatable deployment practices, all of which transfer across B2B SaaS companies that serve regulated or complex enterprise buyers.
This role is best suited to an engineer who prefers ambiguity at the boundary of product and production, and who is comfortable being a technical interface across R&D, SRE, and go to market counterparts. It will fit someone who enjoys hands on debugging in distributed systems and values influence through field learnings, documentation, and incident driven iteration rather than feature delivery alone.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) in Cyberhaven’s R&D organization, you will embed deeply with enterprise customers deploying Cyberhaven’s Content Inspection (CI) stack in their own cloud or datacenter environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes). You operate where real customer environments meet product engineering—turning complex deployments, failures, and edge cases into concrete product and reliability improvements.This role is hands-on, highly technical, and outward-facing. You are part of R&D, and will partner with SRE, Sales Engineering, Professional Services, and Customer Support to accelerate successful customer outcomes while strengthening CI’s architecture, operability, and scalability as DSPM on-prem connectors become the norm.
What you’ll do
Act as an R&D owner for customer deployments of on-prem and hybrid Content Inspection (CI), ensuring real-world requirements inform product behavior and roadmap decisions.
Work directly with customers to architect, deploy, and validate CI in production environments, including Kubernetes, Helm, networking, security, and performance considerations.
Lead investigation of complex customer issues by reproducing them in lab or test clusters, either delivering fixes or driving them to resolution within R&D.
Serve as a technical point of contact for high-severity CI incidents, joining customer bridges and coordinating resolution across R&D, SRE, and Customer Support.
Partner with SRE on reliability, capacity planning, upgrade safety, and operational readiness for on-prem CI.
Collaborate with Sales Engineering during late-stage evaluations and technical deep dives to ensure CI can meet customer architecture, scale, and security requirements.
Co-lead deployments and upgrades with Professional Services, validating prerequisites, reviewing configurations, and shaping best practices for repeatable success.
Act as the R&D point person for DSPM on-prem connectors, supporting design partners, validating new capabilities, and enabling large-scale customer rollouts.
Drive product improvements by owning feedback related to diagnostics, observability, configuration safety, upgrade/rollback behavior, and supportability.
Create internal design notes, runbooks, and technical documentation that bridge customer reality and engineering intent.
Participate in design reviews, release readiness, and post-incident retrospectives to ensure customer learnings are captured and acted on.
Who you are
3+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Production Engineering, SRE, or customer-facing roles embedded within an R&D or product engineering organization.
Deep, hands-on experience with Linux, containers, and Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS, or self-managed clusters).
Experience delivering and operating on-prem or hybrid enterprise software, including Kubernetes platforms and virtual appliances.
Strong understanding of enterprise networking and security (TLS, DNS, load balancers, proxies, firewalls).
Skilled at debugging distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces, and comfortable navigating unfamiliar systems quickly.
Confident working directly with enterprise customers on architecture discussions, deployments, and high-severity incidents.
Product-minded: you naturally turn customer friction into actionable engineering improvements.
Clear communicator who can operate across engineering, go-to-market, and customer-facing teams.
Joining Cyberhaven is a chance to revolutionize data security. Traditional tools fall short, but we’ve reimagined protection with AI-enabled data lineage that analyzes billions of workflows to understand data, detect risk, and stop threats. Backed by $250M from leading investors like Khosla and Redpoint, our team includes leaders who built industry-defining technologies at CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Meta, Google, and more. This role lets you shape the future of data security, alongside experts driven to help customers protect their most valuable information.
Cyberhaven is committed to creating a diverse environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
