Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Remote

Compensation: $172,000 - $250,000

Employment Type: Full-Time

Travel Requirement: Regular travel between 25-50%

Clearance: Must be eligible for a U.S. Secret Clearance

What you can expect as the Principal Forward Deployed Engineer at Fortress...

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer operates at the intersection of customer success, solution engineering, cybersecurity, data engineering, and AI-enabled automation. This role works directly with U.S. power utility and government customers to solve urgent cyber and operational risk challenges while turning those learnings into repeatable, productized capabilities. AI-assisted cyber threats are increasing demand for rapid, customer-specific analysis. Customers need to know whether their current defenses can withstand machine-speed vulnerability discovery, exploitation analysis, and attack path evaluation. This role addresses that need through embedded, hands-on engineering: quickly understanding customer processes, systems, data, cyber posture, and constraints, then delivering working solutions in approved customer or secure environments. This is a seasoned, principal-level individual contributor role reporting into Customer Success. This is an ideal opportunity for a senior technologist who wants to work on the front line of AI-era cyber defense for critical infrastructure, combining deep technical delivery with executive-level customer impact and commercial judgment. 

Responsibilities Include

• Work directly with U.S. power utility and government customers to reduce cyber risk, improve visibility, and respond to AI-assisted threats.
• Quickly understand customer processes, systems, data, cyber posture, and business constraints.
• Help customers answer urgent cyber questions, such as which products, vendors, components, assets, or supply chain relationships may be impacted by a newly announced threat or vulnerability.
• Access, export, normalize, and compare customer data across vulnerability management, endpoint detection, network topology, attack path tooling, asset inventories, software bills of materials (SBOMs), business impact analysis, and supply chain mapping.
• Write secure, outcome-focused code, including agentic workflows and batch jobs, to surface insights quickly in approved customer or secure environments.
• Convert bespoke customer work into product requirements that Product Management can formalize into scalable software capabilities.
• Identify expansion opportunities by demonstrating customer value, shaping repeatable use cases, and connecting services-led problem solving to embedded platform capabilities.
• Present findings clearly to customer executives, technical teams, and internal stakeholders.
• Other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7-10 years experience combining software/data engineering, cybersecurity analysis, and customer-facing solution engineering at a senior or principal level.
• Hands-on experience developing AI-agentic workflows (LLM-based automation, agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented pipelines, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to access, normalize, and analyze large, messy, multi-source data sets to answer urgent operational questions.
• Ability to write pragmatic, secure, production-appropriate code (e.g., Python or similar) in constrained or regulated environments.
• Strong executive communication skills, including presenting complex technical findings to customer leadership.
• Ability to operate independently in embedded customer environments and manage competing priorities.
• Must be eligible for a U.S. security clearance; successful completion of a background check is required.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with U.S. electric utilities or other critical infrastructure sectors.
• Familiarity with OT/ICS environments and their operational and remediation constraints.
• Knowledge of NERC CIP or comparable regulatory frameworks.
• Experience with vulnerability management, attack path analysis, and endpoint/security tooling.
• Experience with supply chain risk management (SCRM), SBOM/VEX analysis, and third-party risk workflows.
• Commercial judgment: shaping repeatable use cases and identifying expansion opportunities.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, cybersecurity, or a related field required.
• Advanced degree or relevant certifications (e.g., security or cloud) preferred.

Employee Benefits

• Remote and Hybrid working environment
• Competitive pay structure
• Medical, dental, vision plans with employees covered up to 90% with highly progressive options for dependents and families
• Company paid life, short- and long-term disability insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• 401(k) match
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Parental Leave

Employment Perks

• We provide each employee with professional growth opportunities through succession planning, up-skilling, and certifications
• Tuition and certification reimbursement
• Employee Referral Programs
• Company Sponsored Events

Fortress is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employees and applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, protected veteran status, or any other classification protected by federal, state, or local law. Fortress Information Security takes part in the E-Verify process for all new hires.

For positions located in the US, the following conditions apply. If you are made a conditional offer of employment, you will have to undergo a drug test. ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.