Fortanix—Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

Description: In today's world, where data spreads across various clouds and devices, traditional security measures aren't enough. Businesses need a dynamic approach to defend against constant cyber threats and ensure agile data security. Fortanix leads the way in data-centric cybersecurity for hybrid multicloud environments, using advanced cryptography, encryption, and confidential AI solutions. As data breaches become more frequent and traditional defenses fall short, we focus on data exposure management to keep your information safe. Our unified data security platform addresses vulnerabilities in hybrid multicloud environments, defends against threats, and makes it easier to discover, assess, and fix data exposure risks. Whether implementing a Zero Trust model or preparing for the post-quantum computing era, we help businesses worldwide protect their most sensitive data, wherever it is. Our commitment to solving the world’s toughest data security challenges has earned Fortanix multiple Cybersecurity Excellence and Innovation Awards, as well as recognition from industry giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. Our team includes industry leaders and cryptography experts, creating a culture of trust, innovation and collaboration where every voice is valued. Recognized as a Great Place to Work, we're looking for passionate individuals to help us shape the future of data security and work towards a safer digital future. Fortanix helps enterprises protect their most sensitive data and AI models while they're in use, not just at rest or in transit. Our Confidential AI platform let customers run models and workloads inside hardware-backed trusted execution environments, release keys only to attested workloads, and prove to auditors that nobody, including the cloud provider, could see their data. Enterprises and frontier model providers each bring their own architecture and security requirements, and fitting our platform to those needs is where the real engineering happens. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll close that gap. You'll embed with customers and partners, design and develop solutions and integrations, debug problems from firmware to Kubernetes, and bring what you learn back into the product and the open-source community. This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll design the architecture with the customer, then write the code, ship the fixes, and own the outcome. In this role, you will: - Design and develop customer solutions. Understand each enterprise or frontier model provider's AI and security architecture, then design and build how Fortanix Confidential AI platform fit into it, from reference architecture through working integration. - Build integrations. Develop the connectors and workload tooling that tie our platform into customers' existing stacks, and orchestration systems. - Architect the trust model. Design attestation and key-release flows for each customer's workloads, covering composite attestation, and how keys and models are protected end to end. - Build proofs of concept that prove value. Scope and develop POCs with clear success criteria and propose designs that meets enterprise objectives. - Shape the product. Turn what you learn in the field into RFCs, feature designs, and product requirements, and work with core product and engineering to land them. - Contribute upstream. Participate in the open-source community through code, reviews, and RFCs. - Create reusable assets. Turn one-off solutions into reference architectures, sample workloads, and design patterns that the next customer and the wider team can build on. Requirements: - 4–7 years of hands-on experience in systems, infrastructure, platform, or security engineering, with meaningful time spent in customer-facing roles. - Strong Linux systems skills: kernel boot, systemd, storage and filesystems, networking, PCIe devices. - Working experience with OpenShift, Kubernetes, Slurm is preferred. - Proficiency in at least one of Rust, Go, or Python. You're comfortable reading an unfamiliar codebase and making a targeted change. - Familiarity with cryptography and PKI: certificates, key formats, TLS, signing, and key management concepts. - Clear written and verbal communication. You can explain attestation to a CISO in one meeting and debug a TDX quote failure with their platform team in the next. - The ability to work independently, set expectations, and escalate early You'll work at the frontier where AI meets hardware security, on problems that very few engineers in the world have solved. Your work will directly decide whether the largest enterprises and AI providers can trust their most sensitive models and data to run anywhere.