Forward Deployed Engineer, ML

Company: Sonar
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: February 16, 2026

Job Description:

Job Description Job Description Who is Sonar? Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by 7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile. We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily. We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly. And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient . We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals. At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations. Why You Should Apply: At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties. We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should be able to come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With our roots deep in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster. The Impact You Will Have: You will be the main technical architect responsible for how our most strategic enterprise clients and partners implement and deploy our machine learning solutions. As one of our first group of Forward Deployed ML Engineers, you will establish our ML solutions for organizations concerned with the quality, security, performance, and cost of coding models. You will leverage your deep ML expertise and technical skills to ensure successful, production-grade implementations, ultimately driving rapid market adoption through proven on-site technical success and client satisfaction. What You Will Do Daily: End-to-End Ownership: Proactively engage with client or partner teams in Research, Engineering, Data Science, MLOps, Infrastructure to understand their business and technical requirements. With our internal R&D team in the loop, design specific implementations that you will integrate, optimize, and productionize within the client’s existing or greenfield systems as well as transferring technical knowledge to client teams when applicable. Subject Expert: Stay up-to-date with the latest LLM capabilities and implementation patterns, you are learning driven. You will need to explain complex technical details and concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Influence Model Training & Tuning: Represent our core R&D team on-site, leading technical engagement with modern techniques covering all stages of model training using complex, proprietary client data. Ensure architecture is aligned with and optimized for specific constraints (e.g. GPU types, air-gapping). Develop Deployment Strategy: Define and execute a global technical strategy for integrating our ML solutions into diverse client environments, ensuring compliance with sector-specific data security standards and performance SLAs. Based on your implementations, build reusable playbooks and libraries that will accelerate yourself and others. Building Relationships: Operate autonomously and with agency to build strong relationships with clients, create strategic technical partnerships and drive high-value, referenceable production deployments. Serve as Internal Expert: Act as the primary internal consultant, advising product, research, and sales on real-world client infrastructure limitations, performance bottlenecks, and emerging technical standards necessary for product success. The Experience You Will Need: Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field. Experience: 2 years of experience in a technical, customer facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, or as a Software/ML Engineer with consulting experience. ML Engineering & Training Expertise: Experience in the Machine Learning lifecycle (training, optimization, deployment), with a proven ability to lead and execute complex model deployments in production environments. Forward Deployed/Consulting Background: Proven track record working within or closely alongside client engineering teams to successfully deploy and integrate complex, high-performance software, involving cloud or on-premise ML workloads. Technical & MLOps Knowledge: Understanding of modern ML frameworks, programming languages including Python, and deployment technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud services like SageMaker/Vertex AI/Azure AI). Value-Driven Influence: Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical leaders and lead engineers, translating complex model performance and system architectures into clear, tangible business value and deployment assurance. Why You Will Love It Here: Our culture and mission set us apart. We have a dynamic work culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail (and get right back up again!). Great people make a great company. We value people skills as much as technical skills and strive to keep things friendly while still being passionate leaders in our domains. We have a flexible work policy that includes 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for those located near our office locations; some locations such as Dubai, India, Japan and Australia operate fully remotely. We have a growth mindset. We love learning and believe continuous education is critical to our success. In an ever-changing industry, new skills are necessary, and we're happy to help our team acquire them. As the leader in our field, our products and services are as strong as our internal team members. We embrace transparency with regular meetings, cascading messages and updates on the growth and success of our organization. Benefits of Working With Sonar: Flexible comprehensive employee benefit package. We encourage usage of our robust time-off allocations. You will receive 23 days of PTO per calendar year (on a pro-rated basis depending on your employment start date), with additional time provided for sickness, life events and holidays. We offer an exciting 401(k) plan that has a 4% match, fully vested on day one of participation. Fully paid parking in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas. Global workforce with employees in 20 countries representing 35 unique nationalities. We have an annual kick-off somewhere in the world where we meet to build relationships and goals for the company. Monthly catered events, and team events We Value Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the precise results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date. We do not currently support visa candidates in the US. Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

Keywords: Sonar, Lodi , Forward Deployed Engineer, ML, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California