Founding Engineer (Forward Deployed)

Solutions · Full-time · San Francisco (with regular travel to New York)

Triage is an applied research lab building adaptive security and safety alignment infrastructure for AI systems: defending against novel attack vectors and catching misalignment at inference-time in deployed systems. In December 2025, Triage raised a $1.5M pre-seed round led by BoxGroup.

Our team is small, technical, and in-person in San Francisco. We like people who are truth-seeking, opinionated about the work, and move fast.

About the Role

We're hiring a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical relationship with our enterprise customers. At Triage, FDE is not sales engineering and not customer success. It is the role that decides whether our technology survives contact with the environments we sell into.

Enterprise environments are heterogeneous — different model providers, deployment topologies, compliance postures, threat models. A plug-and-play product does not yet exist in this category. The companies that win it will be the ones whose FDEs can sit with a customer's security team, understand their specific attack surface, and translate between what our product does and what that customer actually needs.

Our enterprise pipeline is concentrated on the East Coast, with much of it in New York. This role is based in San Francisco, but you should expect regular travel to customer sites — early enterprise motion does not happen over Zoom.

What you'll do

• Own enterprise deployments end-to-end, from POC scoping through production cutover — including integration architecture, deployment mode (VPC, on-prem, hybrid), and the iterative tuning of per-tenant detection layers
• Be the technical voice in customer conversations with CISOs, Heads of AI/ML, security architects, and the individual engineers running the agent platforms you're protecting
• Write integration code, custom detectors, deployment scripts, and runbooks. Then pattern-match the recurring custom work into core product features.
• Lead technical work on enterprise security reviews: SOC 2, vendor questionnaires, threat modeling, pen test responses
• Drive the on-prem and air-gapped deployment motion — the environments that unlock the hardest customers and the longest contracts
• Bring customer feedback back to product and engineering and influence what we build next

You may be a fit if

• You write production code. Non-negotiable. FDEs who cannot code cannot do this job.
• Strong communication skills and presence — equally comfortable coding alongside a customer's engineer or presenting to a CISO
• Security fluency. You have working intuitions about how systems get attacked, and specifically why AI systems fail in ways traditional systems do not — instruction hijacking, tool-call abuse, chain-of-thought exfiltration, misalignment surfacing as application-layer behavior.
• Hands-on experience (or strong aptitude) with VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped environments. Kubernetes, Terraform, private networking, SSO/SAML/SCIM are your world.
• Comfortable with regular travel to customer sites, primarily in New York
• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD, or prior industry experience in Field Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Pre-Sales, or equivalent. Either works.

Compensation

$170K – $250K plus founding-level equity.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2–3 short technical conversations. After that, we'll arrange time with customer-facing work — a scoping exercise, a deployment discussion, and time with the team.