Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - Cybersecurity & AI Augmentation

About Dropzone AI

Dropzone’s mission is to scale cybersecurity beyond human limits, augmenting every security engineer/analyst with an army of AI security specialists. Humans alone cannot sufficiently protect our digital future, and AI augmentation is the only way for defenders to reclaim the high ground. Dropzone is an award-winning company disrupting the $200B+ cybersecurity market, powered by Gen AI advancements. Their technology offloads repetitive day-to-day work, freeing human analysts to focus on real threats and higher-value projects. Venture-backed, Dropzone’s team blends deep experience in cybersecurity, AI/ML, and SaaS product development. Join them to be on the ground floor of using Gen AI to transform cyber defense.

About the Role

In this role, you will work across strategic customer accounts to help Dropzone become more trusted, accurate, and embedded in day-to-day security operations. You will work directly with customers, Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Product, Engineering, and security stakeholders to understand each customer’s workflows, policies, escalation paths, exceptions, analyst expectations, and operational goals.

This is not a traditional implementation manager role, nor a replacement for the TAM. The TAM remains the primary owner of the customer relationship and account management motion. The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) provides deeper technical and operational support behind the scenes and, when appropriate, directly with customers during onboarding, optimization, large-scale pilots, or high-priority account work.

You should expect direct customer interaction in this role, especially with strategic customers during onboarding, optimization, and ongoing tuning work. You should also be comfortable operating behind the scenes with TAMs, Product, and Engineering to review investigations, identify tuning opportunities, build and deploy customer-specific configurations, refine response workflows, and measure whether Dropzone is becoming more useful, trusted, and sticky inside the customer’s Security Operations Center (SOC).

You will also help create continuity from pre-sales discovery through post-sales operationalization for strategic customers, especially where understanding the customer’s environment early can improve the long-term customer experience.

What You’ll Do

• Support strategic customer accounts as a technical and operationalization-focused resource.
• Partner with TAMs to help customers operationalize Dropzone without replacing the TAM as the primary account owner.
• Lead or support technical discovery for strategic customers, strategic pilots, and high-profile accounts.
• Review Dropzone investigations to identify tuning opportunities, outcome alignment gaps, workflow friction, and areas where customer trust can improve.
• Draft and refine tuning recommendations based on each customer’s specific environment, workflows, policies, and analyst expectations.
• Configure response workflows, notifications, escalation paths, and customer-approved behaviors.
• Translate customer SOC practices into precise, approved Dropzone behavior.
• Help customers identify functional alternatives or product-supported paths before escalating product gaps.
• Open and document internal support or product cases when customer needs cannot be met through existing functionality.
• Produce tuning, efficacy, and operationalization reports for strategic accounts.
• Track impact through analyst feedback, outcome disagreement trends, benign resolution trends, tuning coverage, workflow adoption, and customer trust indicators.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to escalate product gaps with clear evidence and customer context.
• Build repeatable playbooks for customer tuning, operationalization, and long-term maintenance.
• Maintain clear boundaries between strategic operationalization, standard support, incident response, and custom development.

What Success Looks Like

• Strategic customers trust Dropzone outcomes faster.
• Customers move from initial deployment to meaningful operational use more smoothly.
• Customer-specific SOC practices are reflected consistently in Dropzone.
• Analysts spend less time validating repetitive investigations.
• Response workflows and escalations are mapped to approved customer outcomes.
• TAMs have a strong technical partner who can drive tuning, investigation review, and operationalization work.
• Product and Engineering receive clearer field signal with customer evidence and operational context.
• Strategic operationalization becomes repeatable, measurable, and scalable.
• Dropzone becomes stickier and more embedded in strategic customer environments.

Requirements

• 4+ years experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Security Engineer, Detection Engineer, Technical Customer Success Engineer, or Sales Engineer.
• Strong understanding of SOC workflows, alert triage, escalation paths, investigation quality, analyst expectations, and security operations.
• Technical acumen in areas such as scripting, development, APIs, integrations, networking, SRE, CloudOps, DevOps, or security automation.
• Ability to translate ambiguous customer context into precise technical configuration.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Excellent judgment around customer requests, product gaps, risk, scope, and escalation paths.
• Ability to manage multiple customer workstreams with strong follow-through.
• Comfort working directly with customers as well as operating behind the scenes with TAMs, Product, and Engineering.
• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment with ambiguity and high ownership.
• Early-stage startup mindset. You thrive on ambiguity and move with lightspeed execution.
• Being data-driven is part of your DNA.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with SIEM, EDR, SOAR, cloud security, detection engineering, or security automation.
• Experience with APIs, integrations, or workflow automation.
• Experience supporting large enterprise pilots or strategic customer deployments.
• Experience building repeatable customer delivery playbooks.
• Experience working across pre-sales and post-sales motions for strategic accounts.

Work Environment/Travel

Dropzone is a 100% remote company. You will work from your home with company-provided equipment. Semi-frequent travel to professional office settings and other events locally and nationally is expected, including some overnight travel.