Forward Deployed Engineer (Product)
THE OPPORTUNITY
We are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. Watcher is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and multinational enterprises. Every one of those deployments involves custom engineering: integrating with the customer's coding agents and security stack, running in their cloud or on-prem environment, and tuning monitors to their workflows.
We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own that work end to end. You will be the technical face of Watcher to customers across the entire lifecycle: running technical evaluations and POCs with prospects, deploying Watcher into customer environments, building the integrations and custom capabilities they need, and providing white-glove support that turns early customers into long-term partners. You are an engineer first. When a customer needs something, your default is to build it, and then to work with the product team to decide what becomes part of the core product.
This is truly a "start-up role." You will be one of the first dedicated customer-facing engineers, you will have significant say in shaping how Apollo deploys and supports Watcher, and you can earn more responsibility quickly. As we grow, this role can develop toward leading forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or core product engineering, depending on your interests.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The product team consists of product engineers: Jeremy Neiman, Zak Walters, Zen van Riel, Srdjan Miletic and Gustavo Bicalho; research scientists: Victor Gillioz, Monika Jotautaitė, Dmitrii Volkov; and our GTM lead: Kyle Dai. Marius Hobbhahn (CEO) advises the team. Furthermore you will interact with our other SWEs and researchers, since we intend to be "our own customer" by using our products internally for our research work. You can find our full team here.
ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH
The rapid rise in AI capabilities offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents significant risks. At Apollo Research, we're primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than e.g. humans misusing the AI. We're particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming, a phenomenon where a model appears to be aligned but is, in fact, misaligned and capable of evading human oversight.
We work on the science of scheming, detection of scheming (e.g. building evaluations), and scheming mitigations (e.g. anti-scheming). We also work on control and monitoring research (see our scalable monitoring agenda). We work closely with many frontier AI companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others, e.g. to test their models and collaborate on the science of scheming. At Apollo, we aim for a culture that emphasizes truth-seeking, being goal-oriented, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and being friendly and helpful. If you're interested in more details about what it's like working at Apollo, you can find more information here.
We also build a coding agent security product called Watcher that secures agent deployments in companies. Our goal is to reduce the probability of catastrophic incidents by securing coding agents, learning about their real-world risks, and publishing our research on how to build these control systems most effectively.
Equality Statement: Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
HOW TO APPLY
Please complete the application form with your CV. The provision of a cover letter is neither required nor encouraged. Please also feel free to share links to relevant work samples.
About the interview process: Our multi-stage process includes a screening interview, a take-home test (3 hours), 3 technical interviews, and a final interview with Marius (CEO). There are no leetcode-style general coding interviews. You may use AI tools on the take-home; we judge the result the way we'd judge any contributor's work, so you are responsible for the quality of everything you submit. If you want to prepare, we suggest building simple monitors for coding agents and running them on your own Claude Code / Cursor / Codex / etc. traffic.
Your Privacy and Fairness in Our Recruitment Process: We are committed to protecting your data, ensuring fairness, and adhering to workplace fairness principles in our recruitment process. To enhance hiring efficiency, we use AI-powered tools to assist with tasks such as resume screening. These tools are designed and deployed in compliance with internationally recognized AI governance frameworks. Your personal data is handled securely and transparently. All resumes are screened by a human and final hiring decisions are made by our team. If you have questions about how your data is processed or wish to report concerns about fairness, please contact us at [email protected].