Sr Forward Deployed Engineer

About Zuora

At Zuora, we help businesses grow smarter and adapt faster. Our platform powers modern business models — from subscriptions and usage-based pricing to AI-driven and outcome-based offerings — helping companies launch new products, automate complex billing, and unlock predictable, recurring revenue.

We’ve led the Subscription Economy for more than a decade. Now we’re evolving again by building the definitive platform for quote to cash and helping companies monetize their products and services with an adaptable, AI-ready foundation.

The Opportunity

Embedded build

Co-build integrations, prototypes and agents with customer engineering teams in fixed-time engagements measured in weeks to months: production-quality code with a declared destination and a maintainer of record.

Co-author the specification with your Forward Deployed Product Manager, and agree scope and success measures with the customer before you build.

Prototype on the customer’s real data within the first few weeks, then harden it for production: security review, monitoring, and evals for AI-driven workflows.

Design and ship production agents and multi-agent workflows: tool and function calling, sub-agents, orchestration, and MCP servers and clients, with context and retrieval engineered for quality, latency and cost.

Integrate Zuora with the customer’s existing stack, including third-party metering and entitlement tools and ERP, CRM and finance systems, with Zuora as the order-to-revenue system of record.

Build AI-monetization integrations: usage and AI-credit metering feeds, credit wallets and drawdown, and the billing and revenue flows behind them.

Take Zuora’s new AI agents into their first customer deployments, extending the platform toward new use cases and new customer segments.

Agent quality and control

Build eval harnesses and golden datasets with your Forward Deployed Product Manager and customer experts. Set acceptance thresholds and run evals in CI to gate every change.

Implement guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls: least-privilege access, approval gates for write actions, and segregation of duties.

Instrument everything (tracing, logging of prompts, inputs, outputs and model versions) so every agent action can be reconstructed for audit.

Build with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor or similar) as an everyday practice, and review their output with production rigor.

Product feedback loop

File gap reports into the product roadmap. You’re the highest-fidelity sensor the product org has on what customers actually need built.

Write the engagement Brief at exit, our standard write-up of what was built, what broke, what’s reusable and where it should live next. Turn what works into reusable components.

Ownership & handoff

Hold the warranty window (roughly 30–60 days after go-live), then hand off to the named maintainer of record with runbooks and documentation. FDE doesn’t keep a maintenance book of business.

An engagement isn’t done until the customer’s own team can run what you built without you in the room. Upskilling them is part of the build, not an afterthought.

Multiply what you build

Delegate to agents and pull in Zuora engineers, partners and the customer’s engineers so the work moves faster than one person could carry it.

Leave behind tools, components and agents that make the next engagement faster.

Onboard new teammates inside live engagements on a watch one → do one → teach one progression.

What success looks like

Customers adopt what you build: Zuora’s agents and AI-monetization capabilities are live in production and in daily use, and more of the customer’s quote-to-cash runs on Zuora.

The customer’s team runs it without you, and the engagement leads to the next one: an expansion, a renewal or a reference.

Every engagement makes Zuora stronger: reusable components, product gaps closed, and a faster path for the next customer.

About You

What we look for

Builder. Show us what you’ve built: a product, integration, agent or tool you shipped that real people use. Walk us through the decisions, the trade-offs and what broke.

Founder mentality: you act like an owner of the business, not the ticket. You weigh cost, speed and customer impact, make the call, and fix what’s broken even when it isn’t yours.

Ownership: you want the ball when it matters most. You take the hardest problem on the engagement, own the result and see it through.

Polite persistence: you get to yes without burning bridges. When a customer, partner or internal team stalls, you follow up, find another path and keep the relationship intact.

Curiosity: you take things apart to see how they work, whether that’s the customer’s stack, a new model or an API you’ve never seen.

Doer by default: you’d rather build a working version than write a deck about it.

Force multiplier: you’ve delivered outcomes by pulling in people and agents beyond your own team.

AI-first: AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor or similar) are part of how you build every day. Show us a real example: what you built, how you directed the agent and how you checked its output before it shipped.

5+ years of professional software engineering, including customer-facing delivery or startup engineering.

Strong integration and API engineer with real production code shipped against external or partner systems, not only internal services. Python or TypeScript (Java a plus), REST, webhooks, event-driven patterns and solid SQL.

You’ve taken code to production yourself: security review, observability and on-call readiness are part of how you build, including security judgment for systems that touch financial data.

Hands-on experience building production LLM applications or agents (tool calling, retrieval, prompt engineering) and evaluating their output before it reaches a customer.

Fast, and allergic to overbuilding: comfortable shipping in weeks to months, not quarters or years.

Can sit with a customer’s staff engineer and hold the room, and explain trade-offs to finance users and architects alike, with strong technical communication under ambiguity.

Write things down without being asked: specs, gap reports and the exit Brief are part of the job.

Low ego. This is a founding role: the job description will change under you, and you’ll help write the next version of it.

Nice to have

Founder or early-team experience, ideally in AI monetization, agentic product development and deployment, or the quote-to-cash lifecycle: CPQ, contracts and orders, usage metering and rating, billing, payments, collections and AR, and revenue recognition.

Experience with subscription billing, usage-based pricing, payments or monetization platforms.

Exposure to agentic or usage-based AI pricing models, AI agents, MCP servers or agent frameworks, or a prior customer-facing or forward-deployed engineering role.

ERP, CRM or finance integration experience (NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, Workday or similar), and familiarity with SOX or IT general controls.

How we’ll evaluate

Expect a deep-dive walkthrough of something you’ve built, including how you used AI tools to build it, and a conversation about a time you pushed something through when it stalled. We look at judgment (what you delegated, what you checked, when you stopped trusting the output), curiosity and ownership, not just speed.

About the Team

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is Zuora’s newest technical go-to-market motion. Forward Deployed Engineers are full-time engineers in Zuora’s Product & Engineering organization who embed directly with customer engineering teams to build the integrations, prototypes and agents that no existing motion reaches. You work in a pod with a Forward Deployed Product Manager and, where scope requires, a second engineer. Our focus: building the future of agentic quote-to-cash, which means helping enterprises monetize AI-native and us