---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Opal Security'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-opal-security-san-francisco-cm4x208v4j9m'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Opal Security

- **Company:** Opal Security
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $140k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2025-10-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/opal/464ec02f-eb3d-4714-9d78-f82049183a84

## Job description

About Opal Security:

At Opal, we’re building modern identity governance for the AI era—intelligent access management that empowers enterprises to move fast while staying secure. Our mission is to bring clarity, control, and confidence to complex enterprise environments, helping teams govern access without slowing down innovation.

About the Role:

Identity is having a moment. Every company is deploying agents, spinning up service accounts, and realizing their IAM stack can't keep up. We're building AI-native security that scales with this chaos and companies like Databricks and Figma are betting on us to get it right.

You will be the technical bridge between Opal and our customers. You'll embed with prospects and customers during critical moments; sales cycles, implementations, expansions, and build whatever it takes to get them across the finish line. That might mean prototyping a custom integration, architecting their deployment, debugging their environment, or writing code that becomes part of our product. You'll own the technical relationship, which means you get to be creative, challenge assumptions, and build trust through deep expertise.

Please note: We've built a team that works exceptionally well together and has fun doing so. We're looking to bring on new teammates who will both add to and grow with what we're building 🙂

Your Responsibilities:

- Lead technical conversations in sales cycles, design solutions that map to customer needs, and remove technical blockers that stand between interest and contract.
- Write code for customer-specific integrations, proof-of-concepts, and implementations. Some of this becomes productized, some stays one-off.
- Contribute your best ideas to the Opal product, scale your solutions for all customers, and leverage your experience in the field to contribute to Opal's product roadmap.
- Drive implementations from kickoff to production, troubleshoot issues in customer environments, and ensure technical stakeholders become champions of Opal.
- Surface patterns from customer conversations that should influence roadmap, document what you learn, and help engineering prioritize what matters most to revenue.

Our Ideal Candidate Loves to:

- You genuinely enjoy being in rooms (virtual or physical) with customers. You ask good questions, listen well, and can read the room to know when to go deep vs. stay high-level.
- You can write production-quality code across the stack, but you also know when duct tape is the right answer. You optimize for unblocking the customer, not architectural purity.
- No two weeks look the same. You might be debugging a Terraform module on Monday, demoing to a CISO on Tuesday, and building a Slack integration on Wednesday.
- You don't need a manager to tell you what to do. You hear a customer problem, figure out what would solve it, and make it happen.
- You can translate "we need to prove ROI to the board" into technical requirements, and explain "we need to refactor our RBAC engine" in terms a VP of Sales understands.

## BENEFITS & PERKS

- Competitive Salary
- Early employee equity
- Top-tier Medical, Vision, & Dental coverage
- Company and team bonding trips throughout the year fully covered by Opal Security
- Daily lunch & coffee allowance
- Unlimited PTO
- 11 company holidays
- One Medical Membership
- 401k plan
- Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits

This role is based in San Francisco.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds rarely apply unless they meet all the job criteria. We aren’t looking for someone who ticks every single box on a page; we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. If you think you’d be a great fit, then please get in touch to tell us about yourself. Opal is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.

## About Opal Security

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity – Identity Security / Access Governance
- **Target customers**: B2B Enterprise (e.g., Databricks, Notion, Cloudflare, Scale AI, CoreWeave, SpaceXAI, Superhuman)
- **Mission or purpose**: “To secure every identity and access path” [opal.dev/about](https://www.opal.dev/about)

## Products & Services
- **Paladin**: AI agent that evaluates every access request, approves safe requests automatically, escalates only what needs a human, and revokes access when no longer needed.
- **OpalScript**: Version-controlled, code-based approval workflows that scale across teams and environments; AI can generate the logic from natural language.
- **OpalQuery**: Query the entire stack in plain English to surface risk, over-provisioned access, separation-of-duties conflicts, and hidden privilege escalation paths.
- **Just-In-Time Access**: Grant privileged access only when needed, auto-revoke when work is done.
- **AI-Guided Access Reviews**: Explainable recommendations that surface the riskiest access, replacing rubber-stamp reviews.
- **Access Intelligence**: Ask who has access to what, and why, in plain English.
- **Security for AI Agents**: Define what AI agents can see, access, and execute before they touch your systems.
- **Programmable Governance**: Build access logic into workflows and approvals as version-controlled, testable code.
- **Platform integrations**: Connects to 250+ systems across cloud, identity, SaaS, databases, and AI platforms (e.g., Okta, AWS, GCP, Snowflake, GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, ServiceNow, Salesforce).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $59M (latest $23M round announced June 2026); annual revenue not publicly available
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Box Group, SVCI, Cambium Capital. Advisors include former CTO of JPMorgan Chase, former CSO of Robinhood, CISO of Datadog, CEO of Abnormal Security, CTO of 1Password, CSO of Coinbase, and founder of LDAP.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Named to Notable Capital’s “Rising in Cyber 2026” list (30 most promising private cybersecurity startups).
  - More than 60% of the team has joined since the start of 2026, with hiring accelerating across engineering, product, and go-to-market.
  - Major customers: Databricks runs 86,000 just-in-time access requests through Opal; Mercari governs over 5,000 Okta entitlements via automated reviews.
  - Launched the industry’s first platform to see, encode, and enforce access governance for AI agents (Paladin) in March 2026.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native architecture** that understands CISO context with security engineer precision.
- **Policy-as-code** (OpalScript) enables version-controlled, testable, and scalable access logic.
- **Unified governance** across humans, non-human identities (service accounts, CI/CD pipelines), and AI agents—all in one access graph.
- **Just-in-time by default** reduces standing access and attack surface.
- **Self-hosted or on-prem deployment** option for tightly controlled environments.
- **SOC 2 Type 2 certified**, independent penetration testing annually, TLS 1.2+ in transit, AWS KMS at rest, daily encrypted backups.
- **250+ integrations** with major cloud, identity, SaaS, database, and AI platforms.

## Strategic Focus
- Unify identity governance across all identity types, with a strong emphasis on securing AI agents as they proliferate in enterprise environments.
- Scale the engineering and go-to-market teams (60%+ team growth in 2026).
- Expand leadership: new Chief Product Officer (Sameer Mehta, ex-Veza), Chief Technology Officer (Alex Pien, ex-Meta), VP of Field Engineering (ex-Cisco), VP of Marketing (ex-Clumio), Head of Product & Solutions Marketing (ex-Salesforce).
- Continue to build a self-improving system that ensures resilience and enables faster movement without increasing risk.

## Why Work Here
- **Hybrid work model**: Offices in San Francisco (HQ) and New York; employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
- **Fast-growing startup** backed by top-tier VCs (Greylock, Battery Ventures) with significant momentum and market recognition.
- **Mission-driven security work**: Opportunity to solve hard problems in identity security, especially at the intersection of AI and access control.
- **Cutting-edge technology**: Work on AI-native policy engines, large-scale access graphs, and integrations with hundreds of platforms.
- **Strong engineering culture** with leadership from experienced executives (ex-Meta, ex-Veza, ex-Cisco, ex-Palo Alto Networks).
- **Open roles** (as of mid-2026): Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, Product Manager, Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Account Executive, Technical Customer Success Manager, Application Security Engineer, and more.

## Sources
1. [opal.dev](https://www.opal.dev/)
2. [opal.dev/about](https://www.opal.dev/about)
3. [builtin.com/company/opal-security](https://builtin.com/company/opal-security)
4. [linkedin.com/company/opalsecurity](https://www.linkedin.com/company/opalsecurity)
5. [opal.dev/media-press/opal-security-raises-23m-new-leadership](https://www.opal.dev/media-press/opal-security-raises-23m-new-leadership)

## Other roles at Opal Security

- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-opal-security-san-francisco-39ywrh6eh725) — San Francisco, CA
- [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-opal-security-san-francisco-9ps3v5c9j6c2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-field-marketing-manager-opal-security-san-francisco-v228sq12atz3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Southeast](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-southeast-opal-security-atlanta-fhzns023gzw1) — Atlanta, GA
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Southern California](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-southern-california-opal-security-los-angeles-8rke94henpjv) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Mid West](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-mid-west-opal-security-austin-vycxprpkp42d) — Austin, TX
- [Security & Compliance Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/security-compliance-lead-opal-security-san-francisco-b414fmaeemcp) — San Francisco, CA
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