Deputy Forward-Deployed Enterprise Engineer

Job Description

We’re looking for a Deputy Forward-Deployed Enterprise Engineer - someone who can carry Island Mountain’s technology from a compelling demonstration to a working enterprise deployment.

Think of this as the technical owner of the customer journey.

You will sit with executives, security leaders, enterprise architects, infrastructure teams, AI teams, network engineers, and operators. You will identify the customer’s real problem, design the technical path, define a measurable proof of value, configure and integrate the product, manage risks, troubleshoot failures, and stay accountable until the deployment works.

You don’t simply deliver a presentation and pass the customer to another department. You remain engaged from discovery through pilot completion.

This role combines solutions architecture, sales engineering, implementation engineering, technical program management, field engineering, and early customer success. It requires a rare combination of technical depth, practical judgment, executive communication, and personal ownership.

You should be able to conduct a CISO-level architecture conversation in the morning, work through identity and network integration with customer engineers in the afternoon, and diagnose a failed deployment that evening.

In Your Day-to-Day, You Will

• Own technical discovery with prospective enterprise customers, identifying their use case, infrastructure, data boundaries, security requirements, operational constraints, decision process, and success criteria.
• Separate real deployment opportunities from demonstration interest, helping Island Mountain focus engineering effort on customers with a defined problem, internal owner, timeline, budget, and path to production.
• Design tailored product demonstrations for executive, security, infrastructure, engineering, governance, and operational audiences.
• Translate customer objectives into technical architectures, including deployment topology, hardware requirements, networking, identity, data access, model access, tool integrations, logging, storage, egress, approvals, and governance policies.
• Design paid pilots and proofs of value with measurable technical and business outcomes.
• Develop pilot statements of work, implementation plans, milestone schedules, responsibility matrices, dependency lists, risk registers, acceptance criteria, and production-expansion plans.
• Lead technical kickoff sessions and maintain alignment among customer stakeholders, Island Mountain leadership, and internal engineering teams.
• Install, configure, integrate, and validate Island Mountain systems in customer-controlled environments.
• Integrate enterprise identity systems, including supported single sign-on, directory, certificate, authentication, authorization, and workload-identity services.
• Integrate logging and security systems, including customer monitoring, event collection, audit, SIEM, alerting, and incident-response workflows.
• Work through enterprise network requirements, including firewalls, proxies, DNS, certificates, restricted egress, segmented environments, private connectivity, and air-gapped deployment conditions.
• Connect customer-approved models, agents, data sources, tools, APIs, storage systems, and business workflows to the Island Mountain platform.
• Configure governance policies with the customer, translating written requirements into enforceable identity, permission, approval, resource, delegation, data-access, and audit controls.
• Troubleshoot deployment failures directly, working across hardware, Linux, networking, containers, identity, APIs, model services, application behavior, security controls, and customer infrastructure.
• Run pilot operating rhythms, including weekly status meetings, issue tracking, decision logs, risk reporting, milestone reviews, and executive updates.
• Create customer training and operational materials for administrators, security teams, engineers, operators, and executive sponsors.
• Develop technical responses for security questionnaires, architecture reviews, requests for information, requests for proposal, procurement reviews, and technical due diligence.
• Protect the product from uncontrolled customization, distinguishing between reusable product improvements, supported configuration, professional services, and work Island Mountain should decline.
• Capture field learning in a structured form, including customer requirements, recurring objections, integration patterns, defects, usability concerns, deployment friction, and unmet product needs.
• Translate field learning into actionable product input with clear priority, evidence, customer impact, technical context, and recommended resolution.
• Produce final pilot outcome reports showing what was deployed, which controls were demonstrated, which success criteria were met, what remains unresolved, and what a production agreement would require.
• Support expansion planning, helping successful pilots move into production, additional use cases, additional business units, or wider infrastructure adoption.
• Build Island Mountain’s repeatable enterprise deployment practice, including discovery templates, reference architectures, demonstration scripts, pilot packages, implementation runbooks, training materials, and outcome-reporting standards.

Requirements

• Significant experience in forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture, sales engineering, implementation engineering, enterprise consulting, technical customer success, or a comparable role.
• Strong technical foundation across Linux, networking, APIs, identity, security, containers, storage, cloud infrastructure, on-premise systems, and distributed applications.
• Ability to write practical code or automation using Python, Bash, PowerShell, JavaScript, Go, or a comparable language.
• Experience designing and implementing complex enterprise integrations rather than only presenting product demonstrations.
• Ability to conduct technical discovery and identify the difference between a stated customer request and the underlying operational problem.
• Experience working with enterprise security teams, infrastructure teams, architecture-review boards, procurement functions, and executive stakeholders.
• Ability to turn an ambiguous opportunity into a defined pilot with scope, architecture, responsibilities, success criteria, risks, and a production path.
• Strong written communication, including architecture documents, statements of work, implementation plans, technical explanations, status reports, and executive summaries.
• Strong verbal communication, with the ability to adjust technical depth for engineers, executives, security leaders, operators, and investors.
• Ability to manage several parallel workstreams while maintaining clear ownership, documentation, and follow-through.
• Ability to remain calm and effective when a demonstration, deployment, or customer integration fails under time pressure.
• Sound judgment regarding security, customer commitments, roadmap promises, unsupported customization, and technical risk.
• Willingness to travel periodically for demonstrations, implementation work, architecture sessions, and customer pilots.
• High agency and independence, with the ability to advance a customer deployment without waiting for a large sales, services, or customer-success organization.

A specific college degree is not required. We value evidence that you have personally led complex technical engagements from uncertain beginnings to measurable customer outcomes.

Preferred Experience

• Enterprise AI, machine-learning infrastructure, model serving, autonomous systems, agent platforms, or data-intensive applications.
• Private-cloud, on-premise, hybrid, edge, restricted-network, or air-gapped deployments.
• Fortune 500 or comparably complex enterprise environments.
• Security-sensitive, regulated, industrial, financial, healthcare, government, defense-adjacent, or critical-infrastructure customers.
• Enterprise identity systems, SIEM platforms, private networking, certificate infrastructure, and security-control integration.
• Paid pilot design, proof-of-value management, enterprise procurement, production expansion, and contract-support processes.
• Technical portions of requests for proposal, requests for information, security questionnaires, architecture assessments, and vendor-risk reviews.
• Early-stage companies where the forward-deployed engineer helped create the deployment method, not merely execute an established playbook.
• Experience translating repeated customer requirements into supported product features and reference architectures.
• Executive demonstrations, investor technical due diligence, or high-stakes product evaluations.

What Success Looks Like

During your first 30 days, you will learn the product architecture, build a working understanding of the Woven Security Fabric and Agentic Orchestration Governance platform, observe current demonstrations, and create a structured enterprise discovery process.

Within 60 days, you will establish a standard demonstration architecture, pilot design template, technical discovery questionnaire, implementation-plan format, and initial customer-security response library.

Within 90 days, you should be capable of independently leading technical discovery, designing a credible proof of value, coordinating internal resources, conducting a tailored demonstration, and preparing the customer for implementation.

Within six months, Island Mountain should have a repeatable enterprise deployment process, documented reference architectures, a defined pilot package, reusable integration patterns, and at least one customer engagement progressing from demonstration toward paid implementation or production deployment.

About the Team

We’re Island Mountain, building secure, customer-controlled infrastructure for enterprise AI and autonomous systems.

Our product suite includes Summit Series private compute, the Woven Security Fabric, and Agentic Orchestration Governance - technology designed to give organizations greater control over where AI workloads run, which tools and information agents can access, how actions are authorized, how resources are consumed, and how system activity is recorded.

We are moving from advanced product development into repeatable production and enterprise deployment.

We are still early enough that customer experience, deployment standards, pilot structure, product feedback, and field operations are being defined. You will not inherit a finished enterprise playbook. You will help build it.

This is a position for someone who wants direct responsibility for converting important technology into real customer outcomes.

Ready to Apply?

Send the following to [email protected]:

• The title of the position
• Your résumé or LinkedIn profile
• Examples of complex customer deployments, pilot programs, or enterprise integrations you personally led
• A brief description of a customer engagement that went wrong and how you recovered it
• Three to five points describing what you would aim to accomplish during your first 90 days

The door is open.

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