Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)

About Virtue AI

Virtue AI sets the standard for advanced AI security platforms. Built on decades of foundational and award-winning research in AI security, its AI-native architecture unifies automated red-teaming, real-time multimodal guardrails, and systematic governance for enterprise apps and agents. We are a well-funded, early-stage startup founded by industry veterans, and we're looking for passionate builders to join our core team.

What You’ll Do

Forward Deployed Engineers are the technical face of the company. You will embed directly with customers to deploy and integrate Virtue AI's platform within their environments — designing solutions, conducting demos and technical deep dives, and executing proof of concepts. This is a high-ownership role that blends software engineering, customer engagement, and pre-sales support. You will be a trusted technical partner to the most sophisticated AI and Cybersecurity teams in the world, and your field learnings will directly shape our product roadmap.

You will:

• Lead sales discussions on solution architecture, including explaining the Virtue AI platform and its technical capabilities and differentiators

• Deliver technical deep-dives, demos, and customer trainings

• Help customers deploy the Virtue AI platform in their cloud or on-premises environments

• Collaborate with customer stakeholders to execute successful proof of concepts, including AI engineering & Cybersecurity teams and executives

• Identify technical risks, devise mitigation strategies, and communicate deal status to internal executives

• Own IaC (Terraform / Pulumi) for repeatable, auditable customer deployments.

• Package our services into secure, customer-ready deployment units (Docker, Helm, Marketplace images).

• Design, build, and maintain product CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.

• Design production-grade system observability (Metrics, logs, alerts, dashboards) using tools like Datadog, Grafana, and Prometheus.

• Implement secure networking (VPCs, IAM, service accounts, private endpoints, firewalling).

• Collaborate with product developers to align infrastructure and inference behavior with product requirements.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.

• Strong experience deploying production systems on major cloud platforms, e.g., AWS and/or GCP.

• Deep hands-on experience with Docker and containerized workloads, Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or equivalent).

• Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD (GitHub Actions required) and repository management (monorepos, release branches, tagging, rollbacks).

• Strong hands-on experience with deploying enterprise AI or data analytics applications

• Ability to travel up to 25%, as needed to client sites

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong understanding of GPU behavior (memory limits, batching, fragmentation, utilization) and experience with GPU-level optimization

• Startup experience: you move fast, take ownership, and fix things properly.

• Understanding of core security concepts (e.g., access controls, identity management, network integration, red-teaming, guardrails)

Why Join Virtue AI

• Competitive base salary compensation + equity commensurate with skills and experience.

• Impact at scale – Help define the category of AI security and partner with Fortune 500 enterprises on their most strategic AI initiatives.

• Work on the frontier – Engage with bleeding-edge AI/ML and deploy AI security solutions for use cases that don't yet exist anywhere else.

• Collaborative culture – Join a team of builders, problem-solvers, and innovators who are mission-driven and collaborative.

• Opportunity for growth – Shape not only our customer engagements, but also the processes and culture of an early lean team with plans for scale.

Equal Opportunity Employment

Virtue AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We welcome and celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for all employees. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, veteran status, or any other status protected by law.

We also provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities or sincerely held religious beliefs, consistent with legal requirements.