Forward Deployed Engineer

Company Overview

Archera empowers organizations of all sizes to optimize their cloud costs through unique, short-term, insured commitments. Hundreds of customers rely on Archera's innovative FinTech solutions to increase their cloud ROI while accelerating revenue objectives and service agility.

Archera's unique cloud rate insurance products and free FinOps platform enable teams to accurately predict and plan infrastructure growth, maximize commitment-based savings, and hedge against market demands and evolving cloud service provider offerings. Archera works closely with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, along with a broad partner ecosystem, to help customers execute financially prudent cloud strategies.

Position Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you sit where Archera's platform meets the field. This is an engineering role: you will write code, build integrations against partner and hyperscaler APIs, and own what you ship. You will also be the most technical person in the room with a distributor's engineering team, an AWS or Microsoft field counterpart, or a customer's Director of Cloud — explaining what Archera does at a deeper technical level, how other customers have successfully used Archera, and why the numbers hold. Both halves are the job.

You will report to the Senior Director of Field Engineering & GTM Enablement and work across the full deal cycle: technical discovery and commitment modeling on an enterprise pursuit one week, integration delivery or a production escalation the next. You will partner closely with Technical Account Management, Partner Development, Alliances, Marketing, Product, and Engineering. Commitment purchases and exchanges stay with Platform Operations — you set and validate the strategy. Long-term hardening and the roadmap stay with Product and Engineering — you incubate, they productize. This role is remote within the United States, with light travel.

Key Responsibilities

- Act as the technical owner on your engagements, from scoping a loosely defined problem through to something running in production.

- Build integrations and prototypes against partner and hyperscaler APIs — time-boxed MVPs, microapps, and proofs of concept that prove an idea in front of a partner or customer, then hand validated work to Product and Engineering.

- Model and defend commitment strategy against live cloud usage — reservations, savings plans, Guaranteed Commitment (GRI) economics, exchange strategy, and fleet modernization — grounded in platform data you verified yourself and presented to Director- and VP-level stakeholders.

- Take on the hardest technical problems that reach the field: complex onboarding, permissions and RBAC, billing-data integrity, and production escalations. That includes debugging live integrations directly with partner and hyperscaler engineering teams and driving fixes to closure.

- Serve as the technical overlay on large enterprise and partner pursuits, owning the technical conversation alongside Sales, Partner Development, and Alliances — including hyperscaler co-sell motions such as Azure IP Co-Sell and MACC positioning. You will influence revenue without carrying a quota.

- Close the loop with Product and Engineering: reproduce issues, isolate root cause, file and manage tickets, and distill market feedback into evidence-backed patterns and prioritized feature requests.

- Own technical documentation — analyze it for gaps, verify it against actual platform behavior, and give GTM Enablement and Marketing the source material for partner and seller training and certification.

Qualifications

- 8+ years in hands-on technical roles that include significant customer- or partner-facing work. Backgrounds that fit: forward deployed or field engineer, solutions architect, consulting engineer, technical founder, or an engineering lead at an MSP or cloud consultancy. Depth matters more than the count.

- Deep hands-on Azure experience, including its commitment and discount constructs (reservations, savings plans, exchange mechanics) and the billing mechanics underneath them: cost exports, FOCUS schema, effective cost, and custom price sheets.

- Working fluency with modern developer tooling — APIs, Git, scripting, IaC, and CI/CD — including daily use of AI coding assistants such as Claude Code. Come ready to walk through architecture you personally built and what broke.

- Demonstrated ability to debug integration failures alongside a third party's engineering team and drive the fix to closure.

- The discipline to pressure-test your own numbers against source data before they reach a customer. A wrong savings figure in front of a CFO costs more than a slow one.

- Ability to move between audiences without losing accuracy — a technical design discussion in the morning, the same work explained to a CFO in the afternoon — plus comfort with incomplete information and the judgment to decide what is worth building and what is worth escalating.

- Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification (AZ-305) or equivalent architecture depth.

Nice-to-Haves

- Early-stage or scaling-startup experience where the role was defined by what needed doing.

- Experience in a channel or distribution motion — distributor, reseller, or CSP/MSP mechanics — and with hyperscaler marketplace and co-sell programs.

- FinOps Foundation certification (FinOps Practitioner or FOCUS Analyst) or equivalent cloud-cost discipline.

- Multi-cloud depth beyond Azure, across AWS or GCP commitment constructs.

- Published technical content: blog posts, talks, demos, or other technical evangelism.

Benefits

- Competitive salary and equity package

- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage

- 401(k) plan

- Flexible PTO and company holidays

- Remote-first culture

- Opportunity to shape and scale a category-defining FinTech platform