Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Forward Deployed Engineer roles sit at an increasingly important intersection in SaaS: product-grade engineering applied to internal operations. In a security SaaS context, where reliability and response workflows matter, this kind of remit signals a company investing in how work gets done across functions, not only in customer-facing features. The emphasis on prototyping, adoption, and handoff reflects a mature operating model where internal leverage is treated as a strategic capability.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is breadth with accountability. The work spans diagnosing cross-team bottlenecks, building production solutions in an existing codebase, and proving impact through measurable outcomes. That combination builds durable skills for modern SaaS environments: systems thinking across data flows, pragmatic automation and AI judgment, and the ability to transition prototypes into maintainable ownership models that scale beyond the original builder.
This role best fits engineers who prefer ambiguous problem spaces over roadmap-driven delivery and who are comfortable acting as a single-threaded owner. It suits professionals who enjoy translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders, and who take satisfaction in shipping incremental interventions that change day-to-day workflows. It is also a strong match for those drawn to internal platform, developer productivity, or operational tooling paths within SaaS.
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
Reports to: Head of Innovation
Location: Remote US
Compensation Range: $215,000 to $250,000 base plus bonus and equity
What We Do:
Huntress is a fully remote, global team of passionate experts and ethical badasses on a mission to break down the barriers to cybersecurity. Whether creating purpose-built security solutions, hunting down hackers, or impacting our community, our people go above and beyond to change the security game and make a real difference.
Founded in 2015 by former NSA cyber operators, Huntress protects all businesses—not just the 1%—with enterprise-grade, fully owned, and managed cybersecurity products at the price of an affordable SaaS application. The Huntress difference is our One Team advantage: our technology is designed with our industry-defining Security Operations Center (SOC) in mind and is never separated from our service.
We protect 5M+ endpoints and 11M+ identities worldwide, elevating underresourced IT teams with protection that works as hard as they do. As long as hackers keep hacking, Huntress keeps hunting.
What You’ll Do:
The Innovation team exists to transform how Huntress operates: delivering tangible, outsized business outcomes by reducing toil and increasing speed across the company. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll identify high-leverage opportunities, build working solutions fast, prove their value, drive adoption and training, and transition successful solutions to permanent owners. Then you'll do it again.
This is not a product engineering role with a backlog. You'll embed with teams across the company—engineering, sales, security operations, support—to understand their pain, prototype solutions, and ship things that change how they work. You'll operate with extreme autonomy in ambiguous problem spaces, and you'll be measured on business outcomes, not story points.
You act as a strategic catalyst, identifying the specific technical levers that will drive the highest return on operational efficiency. You look for patterns across the organization where a scalable solution can eliminate a category of toil. Whether you’re deploying an LLM-based triage system or a streamlined data pipeline, your focus is on creating a force multiplier effect: creating high-impact systems that empower teams to achieve outsized gains with their existing headcount.
Responsibilities:
- Identify, pitch, and execute innovation projects that deliver measurable business impact; from concept through working prototype, through transition to permanent ownership
- Embed with teams across the organization to understand workflows, diagnose bottlenecks, and build solutions that reduce toil and increase speed
- Design and build full-stack solutions in a production codebase, integrating with existing infrastructure and data pipelines
- Map complex systems end-to-end before building—understand how data flows, where failures happen, and what the second-order effects of a change will be
- Create the playbooks, self-service documentation, and internal demos that enable teams to successfully adopt new workflows at scale.
- Transition successful projects to their permanent owners with the context and documentation needed for long-term maintenance
- Gather signal directly from customers, partners, and internal stakeholders to inform what to build next
- Prototype rapidly, validate with real users, and kill projects that aren't working
What You Bring To The Team:
- Ownership and agency. You will lead efforts on your own, being the single responsible person. This has to be the operating mode that enables your most successful work.
- Systems first thinking. This is non-negotiable. When you encounter a new problem, you instinctively map the system: actors, flows, dependencies, feedback loops, failure modes. You don't build a feature; you understand the system it lives in, then build the right intervention. You can look at an organization-wide workflow and see where a single leverage point could change everything.
- Founded or led a business that required you to build the product AND acquire the customers. Not "I was employee #5 at a startup." You've been the person who had to understand the customer problem, build the solution, sell it, support it, and decide what to build next—all with constrained resources. You know what it feels like when there's no one else to hand it to. This experience is what gives you the judgment to operate autonomously in an innovation role.
- Prioritizes outcomes over tooling. You understand that AI is a powerful lever, but not a universal one. You distinguish between where an LLM adds unique value and where traditional automation is more reliable. By analyzing departmental bottlenecks, you design and deploy the specific interventions—whether agents or custom tools—that drive outsized gains for the entire team.
- Strong, full-stack engineering experience. Ruby on Rails experience is highly preferred. Golang is a bonus. But more than any specific language, you can drop into an unfamiliar codebase, understand its patterns, and ship production-quality code. You read existing code before writing new code.
- Delivers in stages and transitions cleanly. You naturally decompose work into chunks that prove value incrementally. When a project succeeds, you hand it off with enough context that the new owners can run with it—and you move on to the next thing without looking back.
- Communicating across audiences without losing fidelity. You can pair with a detection engineer on pipeline architecture in the morning, demo a prototype to a sales leader at lunch, and pitch an innovation project to executives in the afternoon. You don't dumb things down; you reframe.
- Opinions about operational reliability. You build things that you can prove are working. Feedback loops, health checks, and validation are part of how you build, not afterthoughts.
- Thriving in ambiguity. No backlog. No sprint planning. You figure out what the highest-leverage thing to build is, make the case, and go. If you need someone to tell you what to work on, this isn't the right fit.
- Not afraid to fail. Everyone says it, we mean it. We expect some of our efforts to fail, not because they’re impossible but because they are truly audacious. To be innovative, we have to push the limits of what is possible.
Nice To Have:
- Experience building internal tools or developer productivity tooling
- Track record of driving AI/automation adoption in a non-engineering audience
- Experience in cybersecurity and MSP/MSSP operations or security tooling
- Familiarity with detection engineering, SIEM concepts, or identity security
What We Offer:
- 100% remote work environment - since our founding in 2015
- Generous paid time off policy, including vacation, sick time, and paid holidays
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave
- Highly competitive and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits plans
- 401(k) with a 5% contribution regardless of employee contribution
- Life and Disability insurance plans
- Stock options for all full-time employees
- One-time $500 reimbursement for building/upgrading home office
- Annual allowance for education and professional development assistance
- $75 USD/month digital reimbursement
- Access to the BetterUp platform for coaching, personal, and professional growth
Huntress is committed to creating a culture of inclusivity where every single member of our team is valued, has a voice, and is empowered to come to work every day just as they are.
We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status, or any other legally protected status.
We do discriminate against hackers who try to exploit businesses of all sizes.
Accommodations:
If you require reasonable accommodation to complete this application, interview, or pre-employment testing or participate in the employee selection process, please direct your inquiries to accommodations@huntresslabs.com. Please note that non-accommodation requests to this inbox will not receive a response.
Huntress uses artificial intelligence tools to assist in reviewing and evaluating job applications, including resume screening, skills assessment, and candidate matching and comparisons. These AI tools support our human recruiters in the initial review process but do not make final hiring decisions without human involvement. By submitting your application, you acknowledge this use of AI in our recruitment process. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice for more details on our practices and your data privacy rights.
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