Full-time · Zurich, hybrid · 25–50% travel (Switzerland and EU)
Network engineers still lose hours stitching together inventory, monitoring, logs and tickets to work out what broke. Our agent, Otto, does that legwork. As our first Forward Deployed Engineer, you make Otto do that in real production networks, and you shape how NetFabric does it.
We’re NetFabric, an ETH Zurich spin-off building agentic network operations. Otto investigates incidents, analyses tickets and alerts, and works across our customers’ network infrastructure.
The Role
As our Forward Deployed Engineer, you work directly with our customers’ network teams. You deploy Otto in their environment, adapt it to how they operate, and make sure it delivers value in their daily work.
You run proofs of concept with prospects and shape them together with sales. Once a customer signs, you own the technical relationship through to long-term success.
What You’ll Do
- Proofs of concept: agree on scope and success criteria with prospects and sales, run proofs of concept in the customer’s environment, and gather the metrics and feedback used to evaluate them.
- Deployment: deploy Otto in the customer’s environment, in the cloud or on-premises, and configure it for their network, data and constraints.
- Integration and customization: connect Otto to the customer’s existing systems, such as logs and telemetry, ticketing tools like ServiceNow, CLI access to their devices, and their LLM provider. When an integration is missing, you build it, for example as an MCP server, a Python tool or an agent skill.
- Tuning: turn the customer’s runbooks and workflows into playbooks and skills, adapt Otto to their network, and build evaluation cases from real incidents.
- Customer success: act as the customer’s main technical contact after go-live, help their team get the most out of Otto, and handle their questions and issues with support from the engineering team. Keep customers and sales informed of progress and next steps, and flag problems or requests beyond the agreed scope early.
- Product feedback: you are the product engineering team’s main source of insight from the field. You report what customers need, what works and what does not, and turn it into issues, evaluation cases and code that improve the product for all customers.
How You Work
You write code that runs in production as part of our product. We value a pragmatic approach: solving the customer’s problem quickly matters more than a perfect solution. When a solution proves useful across customers, you and the core engineering team make it part of the product together.
What You Bring
Required:
- You’ve run real networks: a couple of years or more keeping production networks up at a service provider, data center or larger enterprise. You’ve chased a flapping BGP session or a dying optic through logs, graphs and configs, and you’ve sat through a maintenance window at 2 a.m. You respect production: you know a
show command can be expensive on a busy router, and you know when to look rather than touch. - You think in systems: you’re not satisfied with “it works again” until you understand why it broke. You can reason from first principles about how a network behaves, and you can explain it clearly. Many of our team come from ETH and similar top universities, and a strong degree in computer science, electrical engineering, physics or a related field is one way to show this, but so is a track record of solving problems others couldn’t.
- Python and the terminal: fluent Python and comfortable working in a terminal.
- Customer work: you earn trust with results, whether a team is excited about AI or sceptical. You respect the network they have, even when you’d have designed it differently, and bring the right people together across teams. You’re willing to travel to customer sites.
- Languages and work permit: fluent English and German, and eligible to work in Switzerland.
- Customer access: able to pass customer-required background checks for access to production environments (clean criminal record).
Which vendors, protocols or certifications you’ve worked with matters less to us than what you’ve debugged.
Nice to have:
- Relevant backgrounds: vendor escalation support (L3/TAC), professional services at a systems integrator, or service provider engineering / senior network operations.
- Networking technologies: segment routing, EVPN, peering and transit, DDoS mitigation (RTBH, FlowSpec), or DWDM and dark fiber.
- Network tooling: NetBox, LibreNMS, Oxidized, Grafana or the Elastic stack, or automation with Netmiko, NAPALM or Nornir.
- Working with SQL databases, time-series stores or message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ClickHouse).
- Experience with LLMs or agents, such as prompting, evaluations, tool use or MCP.
Where and How You’ll Work
- Travel: expect 25–50% travel to customer sites in Switzerland and across the EU. Travel is heaviest during proofs of concept, deployments and launches, sometimes for several days in a row.
- Remote and on site: you work with each customer remotely or on site, depending on what the work needs.
- Support hours: you support customers during business hours, with the engineering team behind you.
Career Paths
Forward deployed engineering and core engineering are the two pillars of NetFabric, and they sit at the same level. Core engineering builds Otto, and you make it work in real networks and decide what it needs next. Neither works without the other, and you can grow in either:
- Lead the team: build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team as we hire more FDEs.
- Own accounts: take ownership of our largest customers as a technical account lead or solutions architect.
- Switch sides: move across to core engineering or product, and keep building the features you first built in the field.
Why NetFabric?
- Immediate impact & ownership: Join a small, fast-growing team where your work makes a tangible difference from day one. As our first Forward Deployed Engineer, you will shape how NetFabric works with its customers.
- Growth & collaboration: Work alongside award-winning researchers and thought leaders from ETH Zurich, supporting some of the most technically interesting problems in networking and AI.
- Equity and competitive compensation: a real stake in NetFabric’s success.
- Our team spirit: At NetFabric, our culture is about putting customers first and working smart. We believe in open conversations where everyone’s ideas matter and everyone feels empowered to challenge each other’s thinking. We stay grounded and supportive, driven by good intentions to grow and succeed together.
Join Us
If this role sounds like a fit, even if you don’t meet every requirement, we’d like to hear from you.
How to apply: email careers@netfabric.ai with your CV or LinkedIn profile, and tell us what interests you about NetFabric.