Forward Deployed Engineer (100% Remote)
Primary stack
Job description
About the Position
Forward Deployed Engineer (100% Remote)
Remote
Full-time
Permanent employee
The Basics
We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (m/f/d) to join us as the embedded technical expert who takes our customers from "interested in AI" to running real agentic workflows in production.
This is a hands-on, code-shipping role, not an advisory one. You'll work directly inside a customer's environment - understanding their domain, their data, and the business outcomes that matter to them - and build the agentic use cases (using MCPs, skills, and our agent platform) that make those outcomes real. You'll also bring a working understanding of Kubernetes, since our platform is built and operated on it, but that's the foundation you stand on, not the focus of the role.
Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products - this role is core to how we do that with our agent platform.
Responsibilities
- Partner directly with a customer as their embedded expert - not just advising, but designing, building, and shipping working agentic solutions in their environment.
- Get up to speed on a new customer's domain quickly (e.g. smart manufacturing, financial services, whatever it is) and identify the business outcomes AI/agentic workflows can realistically deliver for them.
- Design and build proof-of-concepts and production-track agentic workflows using MCPs, skills, and our agent platform, tailored to that customer's data and systems.
- Act as the customer-side expert on what our agent platform can do - translating platform capability into something their engineers can actually use and extend.
- Work closely with customer engineering teams - some devrel-style enablement, workshops, and pairing so they can own what you build after you move on.
- Feed the patterns and gaps you find back to the product team, shaping what we build next.
- Support pre-sales conversations - helping scope what AI use cases would deliver value for a prospect, and building examples that help make the case for choosing Giant Swarm.
Requirements
- Practical, hands-on experience in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Architect, Forward Deployed Engineer, or similar).
- Real, hands-on experience building with agentic AI - MCPs, agent frameworks, tool-using LLMs, or similar. This is non-negotiable.
- Ability to get productive in an unfamiliar business domain fast, and turn what you learn into concrete technical solutions.
- At least a solid working understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native operations.
- Clear and confident communication with both customer stakeholders and engineers - this role lives at that interface.
- Experience with developer relations, workshops, or technical enablement is a strong plus, as is prior Solutions Architect experience.
- Comfortable with ambiguity - this is our first hire fully dedicated to agentic customer work, so a lot of the "how" is still being defined as you go.
- Ability to comfortably align parts of your workday with Europe (UTC +/- 2 hours).
Nice to Have
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native operations.
Salary Information
We’re a fully remote company and use a formula-based salary calculator to determine starting salaries, factoring in location, experience, and responsibility. This approach helps us avoid pay gaps (e.g., gender pay gap) by basing compensation on objective criteria rather than negotiation. Because we apply a location factor, the actual figure for hires outside Cologne will differ from the reference range above, and the total package may include components beyond base salary (e.g., equity, benefits). We’re publishing this range to comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Your recruiter will walk you through how the calculator applies to your location and level.
Salary Range: €70,000 - €100,000
We Offer
- Competitive salary
- Fully remote work options
- Professional development budget
- Family-friendly policies including paid parental leave
- Monthly perks for remote work costs
- Opportunities to attend conferences
- Transparency in company operations and finances
About the Company
Every new team member changes the team. We love to learn from each other and we are looking for people who know things we don’t.
- Becoming part of Giant Swarm means that, by extension, you also become part of the Cloud Native community. We actively contribute to upstream projects and our quarterly hackathons will give you space to work on out-of-the-box projects. Occasionally, when we, as a team, want to fully focus on one project, we scratch all meetings and routines for a certain time to better focus during our hive-sprints.
- Continuous learning is important to us - we foster this through bi-yearly personal development talks, a budget for training/certifications/coaching as well as regular feedback talks and workshops. Our teams are cross-functional and collaboration is key.
- We operate on a 32-hour workweek (or 4-day workweek, you decide!). We don't count holidays but set a minimum number; You choose your own hard- and software; As a company that has almost, if not more, kids than employees, family-friendliness is crucial to us and paid parental leave is a no-brainer; We pay monthly perks that cover your costs for working remotely; We meet twice a year as an entire company and (if possible) see conferences as an important place to catch up with team members; We aim to be fully transparent (finance, salaries) unless it hurts people and trust you, based on this to make the best decisions
- A note on the use of AI in our hiring process: real people read every application, no AI screening, no automated filters. We build tools, we use tools, we get excited about tools. We also know better than most that the best ones change what’s possible. What we’re looking for is how you really think, what you’ve built, and how you see the world. Using AI is fine - just don't miss the chance to let us get to know you. After all, humans are way more fun to meet at our onsites!
We failed in exactly describing our way to approach important company elements that can be described with ‘buzzwords’ such as agile mindset, cross-functional teams, self-organization, value of the individual or trust & teamwork. However, we truly care about them, we live them and we constantly iterate on them. Some snippets about how we do this are posted in our blog but by far not all of them.
Important note: We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless of ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age. When you apply for a role at Giant Swarm, we will also consider you for other relevant roles, or ones that may come up in future if this one isn't a good fit at this time.
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Accelerating organizations cloud-native transformation.Our managed microservices infrastructure enables enterprises to run agile, resilient, distributed systems at scale while removing the tasks related to managing the complex underlying infrastructure.We’ve created a 100% remote company with a unique culture to inspire great results for Giant Swarm and our team members. We’re excited about our future and welcome you to explore how you can become part of our success story as well.