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Cinder is mission-critical infrastructure for trust & safety at the world's largest internet platforms. The company provides a command center for platforms to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, and prove their safety programs work. Backed by Accel and Y Combinator, Cinder is a small, fast-moving team solving real customer problems at scale.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be the technical owner on the ground once a deal closes. You are the escalation point for customers, working closely with their Customer Success Manager and Agent Product Manager. For many customers, you'll be embedded as part of their engineering team, in their Slack and on their calls, building alongside them. The platforms you support have hundreds of millions of users; when you fix something, it's live that day.
Key responsibilities include:
- Shape and prove the solution by working directly with customers to understand their problems, identify the right use cases, and build proofs of concept that demonstrate value and de-risk the path to production.
- Own deployments end to end, taking technical work from scoping and system design through implementation, rollout, and adoption while partnering with the CSM and owning the engineering plan.
- Build the last mile by connecting Cinder to each customer's stack through APIs, webhooks, data pipelines, custom workflows, and production-quality code where configuration isn't enough.
- Enable customer teams by running technical workshops, documenting what you build, and giving customers the knowledge and tools to operate successfully independently.
- Turn fieldwork into product leverage by solving issues in the systems you ship, identifying patterns across customers, and turning those lessons into reusable tools and improvements to the core product. You'll own on-call for customers when system downtime means moderation stops.
Requirements:
- 4–8 years as a software engineer, solutions engineer, or in a similar role in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
- Solid Python fundamentals; you can read, debug, and extend backend code without hand-holding. Comfortability with SQL, Typescript, React, and GraphQL.
- Real experience owning implementation, not just scoping it. You've configured or customized a product for a specific customer and shipped something that changed what that customer could actually do.
- Exceptionally comfortable with ambiguity and repeatedly take initiative. You thrive when dropped into unfamiliar situations, learning quickly and finding ways to deliver value.
- No degree requirement. The company cares about what you can build, not where you learned to build it. Bootcamp graduates are welcome.
Nice to have:
- Understanding of trust & safety or safety operations, either firsthand or through a specialized background.
- Consulting experience where you turned a client's ambiguous ask into a working solution.
- Familiarity with React Query or Strawberry specifically.
- Experience being embedded with a customer or client team.
