--- title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at DepthFirst' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-512690np79xs' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Forward Deployed Engineer at DepthFirst - **Company:** DepthFirst - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-22 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst/d5631d6b-bebf-4daa-bcc6-eff281c6dace ## Job description ## About depthfirst We believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization. Yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to secure the world's software. depthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-days vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software. Our founding team includes deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and LLMs with technical leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We are looking for strong technical people who are interested in working at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure. ## About This Role We’re looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer to help enterprise customers deploy and operate depthfirst in their environments. You’ll work directly with their security, infrastructure, and cloud teams to understand their architecture, navigate technical requirements, and own delivery from initial discovery through production readiness. You’ll design deployment architectures, troubleshoot complex systems, and write production code to unblock customers. Each environment brings different infrastructure, security, and operational requirements. You’ll help customers work through those constraints and partner with our engineering team to build the integrations and capabilities they need. You’ll also turn what you learn in the field into improvements that make depthfirst easier to deploy, operate, and scale across a wide range of enterprise environments. You’re excited about this role because you will… - Own enterprise deployments from architecture and planning through installation, troubleshooting, upgrades, and operational handoff. - Work directly with customer security, infrastructure, and cloud teams to understand their environments and establish a clear path to production. - Solve deployment challenges across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, identity and access management, and application configuration. - Write code to unblock deployments, build integrations, and deliver new product capabilities. - Build tooling and automation for onboarding, deployment validation, upgrades, and ongoing operations. - Turn recurring customer needs into reusable platform improvements, working closely with our infrastructure, product, and security engineers. - Communicate technical tradeoffs, dependencies, and progress clearly, keeping customer and internal teams aligned. - Travel to customer sites as needed to support successful deployments. ## Qualifications - Experience building and operating production systems in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, SRE, or a similar role. - Strong hands-on knowledge of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes, including deploying, debugging, and operating applications in production. - A solid understanding of networking and cloud security fundamentals, including private connectivity, DNS, TLS, IAM, and access controls. - Ability to investigate problems across infrastructure and application boundaries, identify root causes, and implement fixes. - Proficiency in a language such as Go or Python, with experience shipping production code and automation. - Experience with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability. - Strong communication skills and an interest in working directly with customers. You can understand unfamiliar environments, explain technical decisions, and coordinate across teams. - Ownership and sound judgment when requirements are ambiguous or a deployment doesn’t fit an existing playbook. - Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco. Bonus Points For - Experience owning technical engagements with large enterprise customers as an FDE, SRE, platform engineer, or solutions engineer. - Deep experience with AWS and EKS, Helm, and Terraform or Pulumi. - Experience with multiple Cloud providers. - Experience deploying enterprise software into environments with strict networking, access, and security requirements. - Experience supporting varied customer architectures and integrating software with existing infrastructure and operational tooling. - Experience with AI platforms or security products. ## What We Offer - Competitive salary with meaningful equity. - Health, vision, and dental insurance. - Office lunch and dinner when working from our San Francisco office. - Direct impact on customer success and product direction. - The opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI and security. --- depthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law. To all recruitment agencies: depthfirst does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to depthfirst employees. depthfirst is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company. ## About DepthFirst ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Autonomous security platform that uses AI to continuously find, validate, and fix exploitable vulnerabilities across code, infrastructure, dependencies, and runtime environments. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $80M total funding) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: Not publicly available - **Founders**: Qasim Mithani, Daniele Perito, Andrea Michi ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity (AI-native autonomous security) - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (developers, security teams, CISOs) - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Secure the world’s most important software." ## Products & Services - **Agentic Pentesting**: Autonomous penetration testing that runs dynamic exploits against running applications to confirm real attack paths. - **Supply Chain Security**: Traces risk through full dependency trees and surfaces only vulnerabilities with a real execution path. - **Secrets & Sensitive Data**: Detects and validates credentials across codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime environments. - **Code Security**: Finds vulnerabilities by tracing business logic, data flows, and cross-service interactions across the codebase. - **Dependency Firewall**: Detects and blocks malicious behavior before it spreads in the environment. - **Fix & Verify**: Generates merge-ready pull requests for every confirmed vulnerability, then replays the attack post-fix to ensure the vulnerability is truly resolved. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding $80M (Series B announced March 2026, led by Meritech Capital Partners; Series A with 12 investors) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Meritech Capital Partners (lead Series B), plus 12 Series A investors. Backed by leading investors in AI, security, and software. - **Growth Signals**: 33 employees (366.7% YoY growth); 11 active job postings; claims 8x more true positives and 95% fewer false positives vs. leading tools; 90% of fixes accepted by developers; $5M in platform credits offered to open source maintainers via the Open Defense Initiative. ## Competitive Advantages - **AI-native context-aware reasoning** – The platform understands code, business logic, and infrastructure to find complex vulnerabilities (including business logic flaws and chained exploits) that siloed tools miss. - **Extremely low false positives and high fix acceptance** – 95% false positive reduction and 90% developer-accepted fixes create trust and productivity. - **Founding team** – Built security at Cash App/Faire, infrastructure at AWS/Databricks, and AI research at Google DeepMind (contributions to Gemini, AlphaDev, Nature publications). - **Continuous autonomous verification** – After each fix, the same attack is replayed in the running application; vulnerabilities are only closed when exploitation fails, not when code changes. ## Strategic Focus - Advancing AI agents for security through reinforcement learning (training vulnerability discovery agents, e.g., dfs-mini1 model). - Scaling enterprise adoption and expanding the Open Defense Initiative to secure widely deployed open source projects. - Building a research-driven applied AI lab focused on software security. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Positioned as an "applied AI lab" at the frontier of security and AI research. Team members come from top companies like Databricks, Meta, Google DeepMind, Faire, and Notion. - **Work policy**: On-site in San Francisco (multiple offices, including 250 Montgomery St and 1 Sutter St). - **Open roles**: 11 positions across Engineering (Backend, Product, Security, Research), Sales (Account Executive, SDR, Solutions Engineer), Product Design, and Business Operations. - **Notable perks**: Not explicitly detailed but typical for well-funded Series B startups; equity, competitive compensation, and the chance to work on cutting-edge autonomous security in a rapidly growing team. ## Sources 1. [depthfirst.com](https://depthfirst.com/) 2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst) 3. [depthfirst.com/about](https://depthfirst.com/about) 4. [linkedin.com/company/depthfirst](https://www.linkedin.com/company/depthfirst) 5. [builtin.com/company/depthfirst](https://builtin.com/company/depthfirst) ## Other roles at DepthFirst - [Senior Solutions Engineer, APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-solutions-engineer-apj-depthfirst-australia-f2cwkjm21emy) — Australia - [Strategic Account Executive, APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-account-executive-apj-depthfirst-australia-yrqpd6mqqm38) — Australia - [Field Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-depthfirst-san-francisco-yt6nh3vvax7s) — San Francisco, CA - [Infrastructure Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-software-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-rwb324qj0t65) — San Francisco, CA - [Designer (Product + Brand)](https://feeny.ai/job/designer-product-brand-depthfirst-san-francisco-9nbk4635yq03) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Software Engineer, Corporate Security](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-corporate-security-depthfirst-san-francisco-3aadyxq5thky) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Software Security Engineer, Infrastructure & Identity](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-security-engineer-infrastructure-identity-depthfirst-san-4z7tqza00za0) — San Francisco, CA - [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-p28z932vakx0) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-account-manager-depthfirst-san-francisco-q9z1adhzcasb) — San Francisco, CA - [Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiter-depthfirst-san-francisco-nctmw46zw084) — San Francisco, CA