Forward Deployed Engineer

At Keycard, we’re building identity & access infrastructure for the agent-native era—where software isn’t static, but a dynamic, constantly changing system of AI agents working on behalf of people and businesses to complete dynamic tasks at runtime.

Our mission is to unlock the agent economy by empowering developers and enterprises with the secure, scalable foundations they need to build, deploy, adopt, and trust agentic applications. To do this, we’re building the real-time, in-band, contextual guardrails required to transition from human-driven to truly autonomous and agentic workflows that give users, builders, and security teams the confidence and control they need to bring agents out of the lab and into production.

At our core, we’re laser-focused on delivering a delightful, best-in-class developer experience that gives them the tools they need to create category-defining applications and experiences while giving platform and security teams the security, scalability, visibility, control, and enablement they need to accelerate their organizations journey to becoming agent native.

We’re a small, distributed team of repeat founders and builders, with backgrounds from Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku.

Joining Keycard now means helping define not just our technology, but also the culture and company we’re building together—during a once-in-a-generation platform shift.

We’re hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical relationship with customers from discovery through production deployment. This role offers an exciting opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI problems with innovative customers who are at the bleeding edge of AI-native transformations.

This is a founding role that will shape how we work with customers and what we build next. You’ll be the technical face of Keycard, working directly with founders, strategic partners and early adopters, turning customer needs into shipped deployments and repeatable playbooks.

• Own customer outcomes end to end: Run discovery, define success criteria, design the solution, build proofs of value, and ship production deployments. We’re building playbooks and best practices in a world where playbooks and best practices don’t exist.. yet.

• Help customers become agent-native: Work with customers to build and adopt agents to transform the way they work to be agent-first. Design and implement production-ready solutions that showcase how dynamic, ephemeral access controls enable safe agent-to-production workflows and unlock new possibilities for autonomous workflows.

• Build repeatable processes that scale: Develop sales artifacts, agent integration templates, implementation guides, and processes to scale our customer success organization. Create the foundation that enables future teams to help customers become agent-native at scale.

• Contribute to the learning machine: Shape the direction of our product and company by identifying and prioritizing customer insights, implementation challenges, and scaling needs that directly influence the roadmap.

• Build the ecosystem: Work with Product to build relationships and integrations with technical partners. Ship reference implementations and develop joint demos that make Keycard easy to adopt through partners.

• Ownership mindset: You take responsibility for results, thrive in ambiguity, and deliver consistently while balancing speed with quality.

• Builder and communicator: You can ship production code and explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences while building trust with customer teams.

• Full-cycle customer experience: You’ve worked across discovery, prototype, deployment, and support, and you know how to keep teams aligned and moving.

• Agent systems experience: Hands-on work with agents, tool use, orchestration, or production AI workflows, plus curiosity about where this ecosystem is going.

• Security-first mindset: You default to least privilege and thoughtful risk management. Experience with identity, access control, or authentication is a plus.

• Experience with agent frameworks and emerging tool standards, including MCP and multi-agent interoperability patterns

• Comfort with modern cloud infrastructure including Kubernetes, service meshes, and edge platforms like Cloudflare and Vercel

• Track record in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions engineering, sales engineering, solutions architecture, or customer success engineering

• Open source contributions or thought leadership in AI infrastructure, security, or identity

• Build at the Frontier: Work every day at the frontier of agent-native systems — shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn’t been built before. You’ll be given huge autonomy, the opportunity to gain mastery, and the chance to work in a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.

• Truly Agent-Native Culture: At Keycard, we don’t just enable others to adopt agents — we use them ourselves to build. You’ll help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage.

• Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) give you the security to focus on building — and the asymmetric upside of ownership in a company chasing a category-defining mission.

• Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, plus 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to fully recharge.

• Tools That Keep You Ahead: A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and the best AI tools available so you can work at the forefront of agent-native workflows.

• Remote-First Flexibility: We are a remote-first team prioritizing asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. Work where you’re strongest — we just want the best.

Keycard is building the fundamental unlock for the next generation of software: enabling truly secure and trusted agentic applications. Under the hood, we’re building a new identity and access control stack to take us from a world of static, user-focused, long-lived roles and credentialing to one of mixed machine & human interaction that is dynamic, contextually-scoped, and short-lived.

By joining as an early employee, you’ll have the opportunity to help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined design, empowerment to own meaningful problems, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact. You’ll collaborate with the founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Auth0, and Heroku.

If you’re energized by tackling complex distributed systems and want to advance both developer productivity and security posture, with a hunger to learn, have an impact, and move quickly with determination we’d love to explore how you can help us shape the future of software.