Forward Deployed Engineer

About Kilo Code

Kilo is the all-in-one, open-source agentic engineering platform. We're #1 on OpenRouter, have 1M+ active developers, and process over 21 trillion tokens monthly. We're growing fast, shipping constantly, and building in public

Co-founded by Sid Sijbrandij (co-founder of GitLab and UBoatWorx) and Scott Breitenother (founder of Brooklyn Data Co), we're growing quickly to 35 people. We meet quarterly for in-person focus weeks (think hackathon, not conference room) and value humble, hungry colleagues who move at Kilo Speed — taking ownership and driving progress fast by staying curious and aligned with others, not by ignoring the team.

The Role

Here at Kilo, we’ve just brought on our first Sales professionals and are selling to enterprise customers for the first time. As our first Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll be the technical backbone of those early customer engagements: embedded with prospects, understanding their workflows, and building the solutions that remove friction and prove Kilo’s value in the real world.

You’ll play a hands-on engineering role (and go through our engineering hiring process) — writing code, delivering implementations, debugging integrations, and shaping how customers adopt Kilo end-to-end. You’ll bridge Sales and Engineering with empathy and clarity, ensuring customers see real success with Kilo long before they sign a contract.

You’ll also help define what “deployment” even means at Kilo. That means inventing the motion as you execute it: discovering what customers need, translating it into clear product feedback, and building the technical artifacts, features, or integrations that unlock deals.

And because you’re a full engineer, you’ll go into the product when something needs fixing or enhancement — not wait for someone else to queue it.

Someone who is a great fit for this role would love working directly with customers and be deeply skilled in software development and SDLC practices. This might be the perfect job if you’re a software engineer who’s too extroverted, too curious, or too energized by real-world impact to spend all day heads-down in the editor.

What you’ll own

• Securing the technical win by activating real developers on real workloads during the sales cycle as part of our Kilo Speedrun program

• Running technical discovery, solutioning, and demos tied to concrete customer outcomes

• Ensuring developers are successfully onboarded and seeing value post-close

• Writing specs and delivering product features, integrations, or fixes based on customer needs

• Creating deployment patterns and technical artifacts that accelerate future customer adoption

• Helping Sales understand real customer workflows so they can run strong conversations when you’re not on the call

What you’ll help with

• Defining the forward deployment motion at Kilo — what great looks like, how we engage, what artifacts we rely on, and how we create repeatable customer success

• Improving our pre- and post-sales processes and tooling so we can understand customer needs faster, deliver value faster, and reduce friction across the lifecycle

• Shaping the product direction by translating customer pain points, workflows, and adoption blockers into crisp, actionable insights for Engineering

• Building internal alignment between Sales, Engineering, and Support so we always know what customers need and where we’re delivering value next

Extra credit for

• Experience deploying or integrating developer tools, SDKs, or AI platforms

• Prior roles in forward deployment, solutions architecture, field engineering, or technical consulting

• Hands-on experience building demo environments, reference implementations, or technical collateral used in customer evaluations

• Comfort working directly with both executives and deep technical teams
  Familiarity with open-core business models and community-to-enterprise adoption patterns

• A track record of driving customer outcomes through code, not just recommendations

Week 1

• Meet Sales, Engineering, and Support — understand our current customer workflows and where the friction points are

• Be paired up with another engineer and immediately dive into the code

• Assist in testing features, shipping features, and fixing bugs

• Get plugged into our user community and start chatting with our users

Month 1

• Embed with one of our engineering teams to learn the product and our delivery processes inside and out, shipping features at the pace and expectations of our team

• Significantly contributed to shipping a large project or feature

• Have a solid relationship with the team & a good understanding of the codebase

• Have opinions and ideas on new products and features

Month 3

• Own the technical win rate for the enterprise customers you support

• Stand up the first version of Kilo’s forward deployment framework — patterns, templates, guidance, and tooling

• Deliver at least one customer-facing integration, feature improvement, or technical artifact that materially reduces adoption friction

• Capture a referenceable customer success story demonstrating real-world adoption of Kilo Code

• Help anchor where Forward Deployment fits in our GTM motion as we scale

The Reality of Working at Kilo

We want to be transparent about what it takes to succeed here.

• We Work Exceptionally Hard: We are ambitious, and ambition requires effort. Most people who do not succeed at Kilo fail because they underestimate the work ethic required. We’re not a 9-9-6 shop, but we do expect you to bring energy, intensity, and grit every single day.

• High Accountability: We don't hide behind vanity metrics. You will have a number (WAUzer), and you will be responsible for hitting it.

• A Driven Culture: We foster healthy competition and a shared will to win. We support each other, but we also push each other to be the absolute best.

Location: Flexible (US or Western Europe time zones preferred)
Travel: Quarterly in-person focus weeks, travel to customer site 25-50% of the time