Principal 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 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 usage-based products, and taking Zuora’s new AI agents into their first customer deployments. Internally, we call this role a Delta. The job is to embed with a customer’s software engineers and build the ideal end-state integration: real code, not slideware or a bare-bones demo, taken from idea to production in weeks, not quarters. You’ll expose what the platform can’t do yet, fill the gap fast, and document exactly what product must pave next. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales, Services and Support so what you learn in the field becomes a capability the whole company can use. Our tech stack: Zuora Billing and Revenue platform APIs; customer-side integration stacks vary by engagement. What you’ll do & achieve 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. Build only after the spec is signed by the customer sponsor, FDE leadership and Product & Engineering. No unsigned builds. • 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 f