Forward Deployed Engineer (SDEV)

PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE: PD) is the global leader in AI-first digital operations. By automatically detecting, diagnosing, and remediating issues, the PagerDuty Platform orchestrates AI agents and automated workflows with context from over 750 integrations. Trusted by approximately two-thirds of the Fortune 100 and nearly half of the Fortune 500, PagerDuty is the industry standard for organizations scaling resilient, autonomous operations. Notable customers include Chipotle, Cloudflare, Docusign, Fox, Nvidia, Salesforce, Spotify, Zoom and more. We are growing rapidly and hiring top talent with leading AI skills across engineering, sales, product, marketing, and beyond as we build the leading digital operations platform.
PagerDuty is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (SRE Agent) to join our customer-focused SRE Agent team! As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work inside PagerDuty’s largest customer accounts, connecting the SRE Agent to their production environments (observability tools, infrastructure as code, GitOps tooling, and CI/CD pipelines) and guiding their teams from AI-assisted incident response to supervised and autonomous actions with safety guardrails. You will also contribute code directly back to the core SRE Agent product, building reusable tools, connectors, and skills derived from real customer needs.
This is an exciting opportunity to join the product engineering team as the Staff Engineer and directly shape how agentic AI operates within the most strategic customers. The ideal candidate brings a strong background as a software engineer, hands-on experience shipping LLM/agentic systems to production, and the customer-facing skills to bridge technical execution with business strategy.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Embed and drive SRE Agent adoption: Work onsite and in regular contact with 2–4 strategic customer teams to deploy the SRE Agent, configure tools and connectors, and embed AI actions across their incident management lifecycle to drive adoption and value
Build and contribute core agent capabilities: Scope, design, and build reusable agent tools, connectors, and skills on the agent’s extensibility surfaces, shipping them through the product team's repos, review process, and evaluation gates.
Run pilots and unblock customer adoption: Stand up new agentic capabilities with strategic accounts first, gather eval data, identify technical blockers (permissions, telemetry, missing connectors), and build production fixes directly into the product.
Integrate with production stacks and progressive delivery: Connect the SRE Agent to IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), GitOps (ArgoCD), CI/CD pipelines, and observability platforms, guiding customers safely from AI-assisted to autonomous operations.
Set technical direction and feedback insights: Define 3–6 month technical roadmaps across assigned accounts, provide architectural guidance to product managers and engineering managers, and bring customer friction and eval data back to the core team.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
8+ years of experience building and shipping production software across team boundaries (assessed against PagerDuty Staff Engineer / SDE V expectations).
Hands-on experience with LLM and agent systems in production, including agent development, tool-use frameworks (MCP or equivalent), evaluation pipelines, and guardrail design.
Customer-facing skills. You can run a technical design session with a customer’s engineers and present the business case to their leadership.
Comfortable with ambiguity. You can start from a vague problem statement in an unfamiliar environment and get to working software without much direction. Former founders and founding engineers tend to do well in this role.
A record of shipping software that got adopted, and the judgment to recognize which customer requests generalize and when the right answer is not to build.
Infrastructure & Deployment expertise: Demonstrated experience with Terraform or Pulumi at scale, GitOps (ArgoCD or equivalent), CI/CD pipeline design, and progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green, soak periods).
Willingness to travel 25–50% during active customer engagements.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Practical operational knowledge of incident management and observability concepts (on-call, postmortems, SLOs/SLIs, alerting).
Customer-facing technical consulting, forward-deployed engineering, or solutions architecture experience on top of a core software engineering background.
Background as a founder or founding engineer accustomed to navigating high ambiguity and driving unscripted problem-solving.
Experience with policy-as-code, fine-grained permissioning, or safety guardrail patterns for agent-driven automation.
Production experience with PagerDuty or competing digital operations and incident management platforms.
Active open-source contributions to the AI agent or Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem.
The base salary range for this position is 145,000 - 218,900 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, commission, equity, and/or benefits.
Our base salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range, which is subject to change based on primary work location, reflects the minimum and maximum base salary we expect to pay newly hired employees for the position. Within the range, we determine pay for an individual based on a number of factors including market location, job-related knowledge, skills/competencies and experience.
Your recruiter can share more about the specific offerings for this role, as well as the salary range for your primary work location during the hiring process.
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Where we work
PagerDuty operates a hybrid work model with offices in 8 major cities: Atlanta, Lisbon, London, San Francisco, Santiago, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. While we offer flexibility within our established locations, we cannot employ candidates residing in:
Location restrictions:
Australia: Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia
Canada: Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, PEI, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Yukon
United States: Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming
Candidates must reside in an eligible location, which vary by role.
How we work
Our values guide how we support customers, collaborate with colleagues, develop products, and foster a culture of belonging. They define not just our actions, but what it means to be Dutonian.
People Leaders at PagerDuty are responsible for creating high performance environments that drive accountability. PagerDuty has four key dimensions that define our Leadership Impact: Lead Self, Lead the Team, Lead the Business, and Lead the Future. Each dimension has three associated competencies to give leaders a shared language for guiding their development, career, promotion, and succession planning discussions. Our Manager Expectations serve as a practical guide for managers to understand their responsibilities, prioritize their efforts, and drive engagement and performance.
What we offer
As a global organ