Example Company

Software engineer

Location: San Francisco
Type: Full time
Compensation: $150k-$200k
Posted: 2 days ago

Join a team building useful software. Work closely with engineering and design to turn new ideas into products.

Forward Deployed Engineer, Platform

Location

London

Type

Contract

Posted

1H AGO

About the role

SurrealDB is on the lookout for platform engineers to join our bench of Forward Deployed Engineers, working inside enterprise customers’ engineering teams to deploy, integrate and run SurrealDB and SurrealDB Agent Memory in production. Few people have years of SurrealDB or agent memory experience, so we care more about solid engineering habits and how fast you learn than years on a CV. We train and certify every Forward Deployed Engineer before they go to a customer.

In this role, you will own the platform side of a customer build: environments, data, integration and the non-functional requirements that decide whether a system can go live. You will pair with an Agentic Systems Engineer who owns the agent and memory design, and on most engagements you will be the technical lead for the pair. You will report to a SurrealDB engineering manager, who assigns your work, sets technical direction and supports your progress, while an engagement manager handles delivery updates to the customer.

About this engagement

Contract role, starting in November or December 2026 and running for around three months, full time
Open to applicants based in the UK or the US
Working US Eastern hours, including for UK-based consultants
You will work on customer-provided equipment and complete a background check before starting
Occasional on-site travel may be required
Our client will make the final selection. If you are not selected for this particular engagement, we will consider you for our bench of approved contractors for future opportunities

Based outside the UK or US? We are also building our bench for future customer work, open to engineers around the world. You can apply through our Forward Deployed Engineer, Contractor Network role [link]

Ownership for designing and standing up SurrealDB and Agent Memory environments on the customer's cloud or on SurrealDB Cloud: topology, networking, identity, secrets and access
Responsible for data modelling in SurrealQL across documents, graph relations and vectors, and for query and index tuning
Leading on CI/CD and infrastructure as code (Terraform or OpenTofu) for customer environments
Building ingestion and migration pipelines from existing stores such as Cosmos DB, Postgres, MongoDB, vector databases or search services
Responsible for observability, backup, upgrades, security reviews and performance testing, including agent memory services and their dependencies
Documenting progress and risks for the weekly status report, plus runbooks and reference infrastructure for future engagements
Contributing to customer architecture and security questionnaires with the SurrealDB team

Hands-on experience of deploying or integrating at least one agent memory tool, such as Mem0, Graphiti/Zep, Letta, LangMem or Cognee (a personal or open-source project counts)

Proven experience of running services on at least one major cloud: AWS, Azure or GCP
Strong technical background in containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code (Terraform, OpenTofu or Pulumi)
Experience in database work beyond basic CRUD: data modelling, indexes, query plans and migrations
Working knowledge of at least one of Python, TypeScript, Go or Rust
Ability to explain technical decisions clearly to customer engineers, architects and security teams
Ability to work hours that overlap with the customer, often US Eastern Time, and to complete a customer background check
Living in the UK or US with existing right to work there; we do not sponsor visas
Familiarity with SurrealDB, Azure (AKS, Entra ID, Key Vault), observability stacks or regulated environments is a strong plus; community contributors and SurrealDB Ambassadors are encouraged to apply

We understand that each candidate brings a unique set of skills and experiences, and we encourage applicants to apply even if you do not meet every qualification listed in the job description.