Forward Deployed Engineer (SDEV)

Join PagerDuty as a Forward Deployed Engineer (SRE Agent) and work directly with our largest customer accounts. You will connect the SRE Agent to their production environments, guide their teams in incident management, and contribute code back to the core SRE Agent product. This role offers the opportunity to shape how agentic AI operates within strategic customers and includes benefits such as paid volunteer time, health insurance, and flexible workplace options.

Active open-source contributions to the AI agent or Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem

We encourage you to submit your resume even if you don't meet every requirement. We value potential and consider each candidate's full professional story. Whether you're exploring a career change or taking your next step, we look forward to reviewing your application

Responsibilities

• Embed and drive SRE Agent adoption by working onsite and in regular contact with strategic customer teams to deploy the SRE Agent and configure tools.
• Build and contribute core agent capabilities by scoping, designing, and building reusable agent tools, connectors, and skills on the agent’s extensibility surfaces.
• Run pilots and unblock customer adoption by standing up new agentic capabilities with strategic accounts, gathering evaluation data, and identifying technical blockers.

Requirements

• The ideal candidate brings a strong background as a software engineer, hands-on experience shipping LLM/agentic systems to production, and the customer-facing skills to bridge technical execution with business strategy
• Infrastructure & Deployment expertise: Demonstrated experience with Terraform or Pulumi at scale, GitOps (ArgoCD or equivalent), CI/CD pipeline design, and progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green, soak periods)
• A record of shipping software that got adopted, and the judgment to recognize which customer requests generalize and when the right answer is not to build
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You can start from a vague problem statement in an unfamiliar environment and get to working software without much direction. Former founders and founding engineers tend to do well in this role
• 8+ years of experience building and shipping production software across team boundaries (assessed against PagerDuty Staff Engineer / SDE V expectations)
• Hands-on experience with LLM and agent systems in production, including agent development, tool-use frameworks (MCP or equivalent), evaluation pipelines, and guardrail design
• Customer-facing skills. You can run a technical design session with a customer’s engineers and present the business case to their leadership

Willingness to travel 25–50% during active customer engagements

• Practical operational knowledge of incident management and observability concepts (on-call, postmortems, SLOs/SLIs, alerting)
• Customer-facing technical consulting, forward-deployed engineering, or solutions architecture experience on top of a core software engineering background
• Background as a founder or founding engineer accustomed to navigating high ambiguity and driving unscripted problem-solving
• Experience with policy-as-code, fine-grained permissioning, or safety guardrail patterns for agent-driven automation
• Production experience with PagerDuty or competing digital operations and incident management platforms

Pay

USD 145,000 - 218,900