Forward Deployed Engineer

Take Platform Engineering From Promise to Production Imagine being the engineer who turns a customer's platform ambition into something running in production. At Syntasso, you'll work inside some of the world's largest banks, travel, energy and software companies, building with their teams and making Kratix and Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) deliver real outcomes. By joining us as a Forward Deployed Engineer, you won't just ship software. You'll be where the product meets reality, and what you learn there will shape where Kratix goes next. Our Mission at Syntasso At Syntasso, we believe platform engineering should empower, not constrain. We started the company after seeing too many teams struggle to build internal platforms that developers actually enjoy using. That's why we created Kratix: an open-source framework that helps organisations design, deliver and scale their platforms with confidence. One early adopter cut platform onboarding from weeks to hours using Kratix, freeing engineers to focus on innovation instead of infrastructure. Building on that success, we launched Syntasso Kratix Enterprise to help large-scale teams extend Kratix with enterprise-grade capabilities. Our customers now run it in complex, regulated, multi-cluster estates, and they need people who can help them get the most from it. Why Joining Syntasso Matters for Your Career Few roles let you go this deep with this many enterprise platforms. You'll see how the best platform teams in banking, travel, energy and gaming work, and you'll leave each engagement having solved problems most engineers only read about. You'll build a rare mix of skills: hands-on Kubernetes and multi-language delivery, platform architecture, and the ability to lead technical work with senior customer stakeholders. You'll also have the chance to share what you learn with the Platform Engineering community through blogs, case studies and conference talks. About the Role As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Syntasso, you'll work inside our customers' platform teams, writing real code on real platforms. You'll take a promising proof of value and turn it into something running in production, then bring what you learned back into Kratix and SKE. You'll be part of an account team, alongside an Account Executive and a Technical Account Manager, that owns each customer from first introduction through to value realisation. You'll lead the technical work across that journey: shaping early conversations, proving SKE works in the customer's world, getting it into production, and driving the adoption that turns it into lasting value. In practice, this means you'll: - Embed with customer platform teams, pairing with their engineers in their repos and pipelines. - Run proofs of value, from agreed goals to working Promises, leaving the customer able to run them without us. - Design and build Promises in whatever language fits the job: APIs, pipelines, dependencies and destinations for the services customers actually need. - Drive adoption after the sale, helping customers get from first install to growing, measurable usage. - Unblock upgrades and integrations, connecting SKE to customer portals, CI/CD, cloud and security tooling. - Turn what you see on site into bugs, stories and docs, and work with Product to shape the roadmap. - Capture reusable Promises, patterns and runbooks so every engagement gets faster than the last. About You - Most importantly, you have a growth mindset. You bring enthusiasm, empathy and a genuine desire to learn, and you obsess over the customer's outcome. - You're a strong hands-on engineer. You're proficient in Kubernetes and at least one language such as Go, Python or Bash, and happy to pick up whatever a customer's pipelines use, and you've run Kubernetes for real, ideally across more than one cluster or cloud. You're comfortable with GitOps and infrastructure as code, whether that's Flux, Argo CD, Terraform, Helm or Crossplane. - You're calm and clear in front of customers. You can explain a trade-off to an engineer in the morning and a head of platform in the afternoon, and you can earn the trust of a sceptical senior engineer. - You thrive in ambiguity. When a customer environment throws something unexpected at you, your curiosity takes over; you make a sensible call, test, learn and adapt quickly. - You care about engineering excellence and practise XP techniques such as pairing, TDD and continuous integration, including when you're working on someone else's codebase. - You're happy to spend time on customer sites in the UK and Europe when it helps the work. It would be great, though not essential, if you've contributed to Kratix, built Kubernetes operators, integrated with Backstage, or worked in regulated environments such as financial services. What It's Like to Work at Syntasso - Working at Syntasso means joining a close-knit, highly collaborative team that loves to learn together. We value curiosity, openness and craftsmanship, and we always keep our users in mind. - As an FDE you'll spend a lot of time with customers, but you're never on your own. You'll pair with our product engineers, work hand in hand with our Account Executives and TAMs, and have a direct line into the Kratix team when you need it. - You'll learn from experienced leaders who've built and scaled successful platform engineering businesses before, including the founders of Kratix and former senior leaders from VMware and Pivotal. They're hands-on and deeply involved in customer work. - We're also human. We look out for one another, we respect each other's time, and we believe balance and wellbeing are part of doing great work, including when customer work gets intense. What's on Offer - Competitive salary (£100,000–£130,000), depending on experience, plus early-stage equity, so you share in our success as we grow. - A balanced 35-hour week, giving you time to focus deeply, recharge properly and work sustainably. - Hybrid collaboration: work remotely most of the time, with regular visits to our London Bridge office in the Leathermarket, plus customer site visits when they help the work. Travel is planned, not last minute. - Research Fridays: every other Friday is dedicated to learning, experimentation and turning field learnings into product improvements. - Professional growth: whether you're speaking at conferences, contributing to open source or writing customer case studies, we'll support you to build your profile. - Learn from the best: work closely with some of the most respected voices in platform engineering, who regularly speak at events such as DevOpsDays, Kubernetes Community Days and FastFlow Conf.