Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

About Sondera

AI agents act on instructions written in natural language, and much of what people mean goes unsaid. A sequence of steps that are each allowed can still do damage. Sondera works on the open problem of semantic integrity: every action an agent takes carries out what an authorized person meant. Enterprise security teams write rules in plain language, and we autoformalize them into policy. Before each action runs, our policy engine renders a verdict given the agent's trajectory: everything the agent has done in the session. The same action, in the same state, under the same policy, gets the same verdict. We publish our research at ICML and NeurIPS workshops and present it at Black Hat Arsenal, BSides and [un]prompted. Our open-source hooks and policy engine already govern coding agents, and enterprise customers run our platform. Our team has built products at Cylance, Databricks, HiddenLayer, NetRise and Obsidian Security, and we're backed by Decibel, Runtime Ventures and Aviso Ventures.

About the role

You put Sondera into production at enterprise customers and keep it healthy once it's live. Inside their environment, you install through their device management, connect their own agents, turn their written rules into policy, and test it with them until their security team signs off. You share each account with GTM: they lead the relationship and the deal, and you own the deployment and the customer's success. With the sales engineer, you handle anything technical an evaluation needs, and you deliver the new deployments, agents and use cases they scope when a customer expands. You decide what each customer needs, what to build on site and what to bring back to the product. You'll turn our AI security research into enforceable, systems-level controls in customers' environments.

Principal is a senior individual-contributor role; you lead through design and review.

In your first year you will

• Deploy Sondera through customers' own device management, with install, upgrade and removal proven before handoff, so their agents are governed within days of install.
• Prove each evaluation's success criteria: turn the customer's written rules into policy, and show with evidence that each one refuses the harmful action and allows the legitimate one.
• Write up every engagement for the account team's readouts, renewals and expansions, and bring what repeats back into the product: policies, the installer and the docs.
• Run adversarial tests in customers' environments, and turn every miss into a fix.
• Govern customers' own agents built on agent frameworks.
• Take customers from evaluation into production and keep them there: upgrades land cleanly, new agents are governed as they arrive, policies stay tuned, and the security team still trusts the verdicts months later.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have deployed software into enterprise environments yourself, through device management, identity and network controls.
• Write production code, and debug across endpoints, cloud services and customers' networks.
• Turn a customer's written requirements into tests that pass or fail.
• Work alongside GTM: you flag technical risk, blockers and new use cases to the account team early, and route new requests through them rather than taking them on alone.
• Explain a technical trade-off to an IT lead and a CISO, and write it down for both.
• Use coding agents daily, and review what they write as closely as a colleague's work. A person who owns the code approves every change to production.

Prior security experience is useful but not required. Caring that a customer reaches production, not just a demo, matters more.

Strong candidates may also have

• Intune, Jamf or other device management, with macOS and Windows packaging and signing.
• Agent frameworks such as LangGraph or Google's Agent Development Kit.
• Security engineering or consulting in regulated industries.
• Policy-as-code or authorization languages.
• A public record of your work: papers, talks, open source or technical writing.

Our stack

Rust for the services that render verdicts and the endpoint software, Python for AI, and TypeScript for the web applications. Policy compiles to a formal policy language. The platform runs in Google Cloud and in customers' own infrastructure.

How we work

We study four open problems: turning written rules into policy, enforcing that policy at runtime, making agent behavior inspectable, and overseeing fleets of agents, including agents that delegate to other agents, without a person reviewing every action. The people who write our papers also ship the product, so our research meets agents doing real work, and what breaks sets our next question. Whoever builds something helps run it. We build Sondera with coding agents and govern them with it. We settle technical disagreements with evidence. We work remotely: we start from written intent, review each other's changes async, write decisions down where everyone can read them, and flag any decision we can't undo before we make it.

Logistics

• Location: Remote, United States. We meet in person three times a year.
• Compensation: Base salary of $240,000–$280,000 USD, plus equity and a bonus tied to customers reaching production, with no bookings quota.
• Benefits: Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents; a 401(k) plan; unlimited paid time off, and we expect you to take about a week each quarter, plus paid holidays.
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas, including transfers, though not for every role or candidate.
• Interview process: screen → work-sample interview and review → deployment interview → career deep dive (a structured walk through your past roles) → references. We aim to make a decision within two weeks of your screen.
• Using AI in your application and interviews: Use AI to prepare, and to polish an application you wrote yourself. In the work sample you'll build without AI, then extend your work with a coding agent, so we see both how you design on your own and how you check an agent's output. The other interviews are without AI.

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification.