Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Description

Kela is a secure, open platform enabling rapid and seamless integration of commercial and military systems in service of Western defense. Designed and battle-tested by Israeli innovators, Kela ensures the West meets today’s frontline challenges and evolves with tomorrow’s innovations.

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to own the technical relationship with large customers and help them successfully deploy and expand Kela’s platform. You’ll work directly with customer engineers, design integrations, troubleshoot real systems under real constraints, and when needed, build scrappy 0→1 features or prototypes that unblock a deal or a deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical relationship with assigned customers across pre-sale and post-sale (workshops, deep-dives, onboarding, expansions).
• Deeply understand customer architecture, constraints, and requirements; translate them into a practical integration plan and solution design.
• Lead hands-on integrations end-to-end (APIs, data flows, auth, networking, deployments), sometimes from the customer’s offices.
• Be the “get it working” person: reproduce issues, debug complex environments, and drive resolution with Support / Engineering (or fix it yourself when it’s faster).
• Define customer-specific requirements, surface product gaps, and turn field learnings into clear product feedback (features, priorities, edge cases).
• Build small “out-of-band” components when needed (scripts, adapters, demos, prototypes) to win deals and accelerate deployments.
• Create technical assets that scale: reference architectures, integration guides, sample code, and repeatable deployment patterns.

Requirements

• 5+ years in a hands-on engineering role
• Strong coding ability and comfort with shipping production-grade code
• Excellent troubleshooting skills: you can take vague symptoms and drive to root cause fast.
• Customer-facing maturity: can lead technical conversations, run workshops, and manage expectations without drama.
• High ownership and bias to execution: you like closing loops, not writing long docs about why something is hard.
• Willingness to travel and work on-site when required.

Nice to have

• Experience with mission-critical / defense / security-sensitive environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes, on-prem deployments, constrained networks, or air-gapped environments.
• Comfort using modern AI dev tools (e.g., Cursor / Claude Code) to move faster.