Forward Deployed Engineer
Posted 2 days ago
The role in short
Embed with enterprise customers to lead technical onboarding, build production integrations, and execute data migrations for the TrustLayer platform.
TrustLayer is at the forefront of revolutionizing risk management by automating and simplifying the certificate of insurance (COI) process. Our innovative platform enables businesses to ensure compliance, mitigate risk, and enhance operational efficiency. As a rapidly growing SaaS company, we are on a mission to significantly expand our market presence and impact.
The role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be the engineer our largest customers work with directly. You'll get their TrustLayer rollouts live: connecting the platform to their ERP, procurement and property management systems, migrating years of vendor and insurance data, and building the custom workflows their compliance programs need.
You'll write production code, not slide decks. What you learn in the field comes back to the core team as reusable integrations, product feedback and fixes.
What you'll do
- Lead the technical side of enterprise onboarding, from kickoff and requirements through go-live.
- Build and maintain integrations between TrustLayer and customer systems using our APIs, webhooks, SFTP and third-party connectors.
- Plan and run data migrations: clean, map, transform and validate vendor, contract and certificate data from spreadsheets and legacy tools.
- Write scripts, custom reports and workflow automations for customer-specific needs.
- Troubleshoot complex escalations with Customer Success and Support, finding root causes in code, data or configuration.
- Run technical calls and workshops with customer IT, finance and risk teams.
- Turn repeated customer needs into product feedback, internal tools and reusable integration patterns with Product and Engineering.
- Document solutions so customers and teammates can support them after launch.
What you bring
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally at a B2B SaaS company.
- Strong skills in at least one backend language, such as Python, TypeScript/Node.js or Ruby.
- Hands-on experience building REST API integrations, webhooks and data pipelines.
- Fluent SQL and experience working with relational databases and messy real-world data.
- Comfort working directly with customers: you can explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and stay calm in an escalation.
- Ownership: you take a problem from "it's broken" to "it's fixed and documented" without being chased.
Nice to have
- Prior experience as a forward deployed, solutions or implementation engineer.
- Integration experience with ERP, procurement or property management platforms (e.g., NetSuite, SAP, Coupa, Yardi, Procore).
- Experience with document processing, OCR or AI/LLM-powered workflows.
- Familiarity with insurance, risk management, compliance, construction or real estate.
- Experience with Salesforce, integration platforms (iPaaS) or ETL tools.
Prep for this interview
5 questions likely to come up at TrustLayer, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Build and maintain integrations between TrustLayer and customer systems using our APIs, webhooks, SFTP and third-party connectors.”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 2Coding
They wrote: “Strong skills in at least one backend language, such as Python, TypeScript/Node.js or Ruby.”
Here's a CSV export from a customer. Write a script that cleans it and loads it into our API.
How to answer
Why they ask: Very close to real FDE work. They watch how you handle bad rows and failures.
- Read with a proper CSV parser; check the header first
- Validate each row and collect errors, not crash on the first one
- Send in batches with retries and a clear report at the end
- Write one or two quick tests for the parsing
Tip: Talk through edge cases out loud: encodings, missing fields, duplicates, rate limits.
- 3Data and SQL
They wrote: “Hands-on experience building REST API integrations, webhooks and data pipelines.”
How would you design a daily pipeline that feeds customer data into our product?
How to answer
Why they ask: Tests basic data engineering: scheduling, failures, re-runs and monitoring.
- Extract with timestamps or change tracking, not full dumps, when possible
- Transform in steps you can re-run without creating duplicates
- Validate row counts and key fields before loading
- Alert a person on failure, with enough detail to fix it
Tip: Make re-running safe (same input, same result) and say how you'd know it failed.
- 4LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Experience with document processing, OCR or AI/LLM-powered workflows.”
A customer wants a chatbot over their internal documents. How do you build it?
How to answer
Why they ask: RAG is the most common first project. They want the whole path, from messy files to answers people trust.
- Collect and clean the documents; handle permissions per user
- Split them into chunks, embed, and store with source links
- Retrieve, then answer with citations; say “I don't know” when retrieval is weak
- Build a test set of real questions with expected answers before launch
Tip: Spend more time on the data and on testing than on the model.
- 5Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Familiarity with insurance, risk management, compliance, construction or real estate.”
The customer's security team sends a 200-question review. How do you handle it?
How to answer
Why they ask: Security reviews often block deals. FDEs help get through them.
- Start from your company's standard answers (SOC 2 report, past reviews)
- Answer clearly; don't oversell
- Bring in your security team for anything you're unsure of
- Keep the new answers for the next customer
Tip: Reuse past answers, flag honest gaps, and offer a call for the hard questions.
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