Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

As a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, you will operate at the intersection of technical leadership and strategic delivery. You will lead high-impact engagements with state governments and public sector partners, guiding both the architecture and the adoption strategy for digital identity solutions.

This role is hands-on and customer-facing. You’ll write and review code, architect systems, and set engineering best practices, while also shaping roadmaps, influencing standards, and representing SpruceID in strategic conversations.

Responsibilities:

• Define technical strategy and architecture for public sector deployments, ensuring both technical excellence and alignment with policy and operational needs
• Act as the senior technical representative in executive-level customer meetings, bridging the gap between technical details and business or policy outcomes
• Lead multiple end-to-end multi-year projects from rapid prototyping to development to operations and maintenance
• Architect and build backend systems, full-stack web applications, and mobile solutions with a focus on security, privacy, and accessibility
• Translate government requirements into robust, standards-based solutions that integrate with both modern and legacy systems
• Mentor and guide forward deployed engineers and delivery teams, setting standards for high-quality engineering and customer collaboration
• Identify and drive efficiencies across projects, ensuring knowledge and tooling are shared across teams
• Collaborate with platform teams to feed customer insights into SpruceID’s roadmap and contributions to global identity standards

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and delivering production-grade software in statically typed languages (Rust, Go, Java, C#)
• Proven ability to lead large-scale engineering efforts that span multiple teams and organizations
• Strong expertise across the software development stack, including infrastructure, devops, architecture, frontend, and mobile
• Demonstrated experience working with public sector or highly regulated industries, including direct customer engagement at both executive and technical levels
• Excellent leadership, communication, and consulting skills with the ability to influence strategy as well as execution
• Based in the US and willing to travel as needed to support state government partners

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience leading digital transformation or modernization efforts in the public sector
• Familiarity with procurement, compliance, and governance considerations in state government projects
• Deep knowledge of digital identity, computer security, cryptography, and user data privacy practices
• Experience as a Field CTO or similar

Additional Information

This job is fully remote within the US.