Job ID: GR-0201 · Engineering · Austin, TX · On-site · Full-time · Travel up to 30%
ApplyGrafty is the on-premises AI app builder. Teams describe an internal tool in plain language, and Grafty generates, previews and publishes it on the customer's own Kubernetes infrastructure. Source code, prompts, logs and runtime data never leave the customer's network. Customers bring their own model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or fully local models), and Grafty enforces token budgets per user, project and team before any API call is made. Grafty is headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Description
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will lead Grafty deployments inside customer environments, from single-server pilots to production and air-gapped installations. You'll work directly with customer platform, infrastructure and security teams to install, configure and integrate Grafty, and help their developers ship their first internal applications on it.
You'll be the technical owner of each deployment. That includes working through network and security constraints, supporting security reviews, and turning what you learn in the field into improvements to the product, installer and documentation.
Key job responsibilities
- Lead installations on customer Linux infrastructure, including air-gapped and restricted-network environments.
- Configure model provider access (cloud APIs or locally hosted models), role-based access, token budgets, and integrations with Jira, Slack, GitHub, GitLab and Notion.
- Support customer security reviews with architecture walkthroughs, threat model discussions and network requirements.
- Partner with customer developers to build their first internal applications on Grafty.
- Deliver the technical portion of product demonstrations and proofs of concept with the sales team.
- Diagnose and resolve deployment issues across Kubernetes, networking, TLS and identity layers.
- Contribute fixes and improvements to the installer, deployment tooling and runbooks.
- Report recurring customer needs to product and engineering.
A day in the life
You start with a call with a customer's platform team to finish a production install behind their proxy. After lunch, you walk their security architect through how prompts and code stay inside their network. Later, you pair with one of their developers on a first internal app, then open a pull request that removes a manual step you hit during the install.
About the team
Forward Deployed Engineering makes sure every Grafty deployment succeeds in production. The team sits between customers and the core engineering group, and much of what it learns in the field becomes product.
Minimum qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 4 years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or solutions engineering.
- Experience administering Linux systems and deploying applications on Kubernetes.
- Experience with networking fundamentals: DNS, TLS, proxies and firewalls.
- Experience coding in one or more general-purpose languages (e.g. Python, TypeScript, Go).
Preferred qualifications
- Experience deploying software in customer-managed or air-gapped environments.
- Experience serving open-weight models locally (e.g. vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp).
- Experience with SSO protocols (SAML, OIDC) and enterprise identity providers.
- Experience supporting security reviews in regulated industries.
- Excellent communication skills with both technical and executive stakeholders.
If you meet the minimum qualifications but not every preferred one, we still encourage you to apply. Experience gained outside a traditional path counts.
This posting will remain open for at least 7 days and will be removed once the position is filled.
Grafty, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We make employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected by law.
If you need an accommodation or adjustment at any stage of the application or interview process, email [email protected] and we'll work with you.
Grafty will only contact you from an @grafty.ai email address and will never ask for payment or banking information during the hiring process.