Forward Deployed Engineer
Though we are fully remote, this role can work from our private coworking space in NYC!
We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer at Ona
Help the world’s largest engineering organizations run Ona inside their own cloud.
Reporting to our Head of Product Engineering, you’ll partner with our customers both on-site and remotely to design, debug, and optimise complex AWS and GCP network topologies so that self-hosted Ona clusters spin-up securely and perform at scale. You’ll work directly with enterprise platform teams, dive deep into routing tables and firewall rules, and turn obscure packet traces into crystal-clear, reproducible fixes. You’ll take your learning from being in the field and work with our engineering team to make our product even better, so that these issues are surfaced and solvable by our customers themselves. Once running, you’ll use Ona Agents to solve the customer’s largest problems and advocate the customers name back to our product team.
Great candidates love solving problems and have a bias for building. We use Go predominantly.
Who we are
We're a talent-dense group of people who transform how software is created, working to empower every company, every team, and every individual to succeed in a software-first world. We've found product-market-fit and are scaling with high velocity towards repeatable go-to-market fit.
We care deeply, and for many of us, building Ona is our life's work. Our operating principles are an honest representation of how we build relationships and make decisions. We choose colleagues carefully based on merit and their authentic alignment with these principles.
If you're energized by the above, we'd love for you to apply!
Role responsibilities
Our operating principles are a core responsibility of every role. We expect anyone that joins the team to take an active part in forming and enhancing our culture by living out these principles and holding others accountable towards them.
Role-specific responsibilities:
Own network troubleshooting for enterprise customers – lead escalations, dissect packet captures, and resolve VPC, DNS, firewall, and deep packet inspection issues that block Ona deployments
Design secure cloud network architectures – partner with customer architects to produce peerings, PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, or Shared VPC designs that meet zero-trust and compliance requirements
Build tooling & runbooks – create Cloud-formation templates, scripts, and docs that automate diagnostics and shorten time-to-resolution for future installs
Champion customer feedback – reproduce edge-case defects, file clear issues/PRs, create SOPs and influence Ona’s roadmap for network-related features
Act as a product champion - Suggest product changes to improve networking for our customers and directly drive and implement those changes
Partner with Solutions Engineering, Sales and Engineering – join pre and post sales workshops to de-risk network blockers and articulate Ona’s networking model to non-network stakeholders
Bias for building - If our customer’s have a problem, you will spring into action to build a solution for them, powered by Ona Agents
At the end of your first 30 days, you will have:
Completed onboarding, including Ona’s product, security, and support processes
Set up a AWS sandbox mirroring a typical customer topology (private subnets, Transit Gateway, on-prem VPN)
Set up a GCP sandbox mirroring a typical customer topology (private subnets, Transit Gateway, on-prem VPN)
Closed your first customer networking ticket independently and documented the fix in the runbook
Published an internal “Ona’s Networking 101” note summarising routing paths, service endpoints, and the most common misconfigurations
Built strong relationships with Support, Product, and the broader Customer Engineering team
Landed several PRs in our product to improve the network story of Ona
About you
Deep Cloud Networking Expertise You have deep experience of Networking within AWS and/or GCP; from designing VPCs, peering, Transit Gateways, VPNs, PrivateLink, and service meshes. You debug with tcpdump, interpret traceroutes, and know where packets disappear in NAT gateways or Kubernetes CNIs.
Customer Empathy & Communication You translate packet captures into plain English, guide nervous security teams, and keep multi-party Zoom calls calm during downtime. You prioritise connection and relationship building - spending 3-5 days a week onsite with your customers.
Builder’s Mindset & Collaboration You don’t stop at fixing the ticket—you automate the check, update Terraform modules, and PR the docs.
Additionally, we're looking for someone with most of the following:
Expertise in cloud infrastructure or SRE roles for SaaS or platform products
Familiarity with Ona or other developer-environment platforms
Comfort reading Go/YAML logs to correlate infra & app-layer issues
Certifications welcomed but not required (e.g., AWS Networking Specialty, CKNA)
Ability to spend 3-5 days per week on site with a customer
We use these tools and expect you to have familiarity with most of them:
AWS CLI · Google Cloud CLI · CloudFormation · tcpdump/Wireshark · GitHub · Slack · Grafana · Notion · Linear Go/Bash scripting · Terraform
Benefits
Flexible paid time off including holidays that are most meaningful to you
Parental leave for all parents
Employee-friendly equity terms (extended exercise)
Health insurance
Retirement
Wellness allowance
Premium work-from-home equipment
Regular company off-sites
Interview process
We are remote-first and so is our hiring process. Contingent on schedules, we aim to complete the entire process in about 2 weeks. We are conscious of your time and are committed to being as efficient as possible.
We'll kick the process off with an intro call to see if there is mutual interest in moving forward.
Next, you'll complete a series of interviews designed to thoroughly evaluate our mutual compatibility.
Hiring manager
Head of people
Technical challenge
CEO
References and background check - Before moving to an offer, we’ll set up calls with 3 direct managers and/or senior leaders that can speak to your performance. Additionally, we will run a full background check (location dependent).