SurrealDB builds a worldwide contract network of Forward Deployed Engineers

Database company SurrealDB says it is building a global team of Forward Deployed Engineers to help customers move SurrealDB and SurrealDB Agent Memory from pilot to production. Until now its own engineers have joined customer codebases to model data, build migrations and tune queries; the company says it wants to do more of that work and needs more people to do it.

The model is unusual: rather than full-time hires, SurrealDB is approving engineers in advance into a network and contacting them when a matching customer project comes up. Each engagement is a separate contract with its own duration, hours and location rules, joining does not guarantee work, and the customer makes the final pick. Every engineer is trained and certified on SurrealDB 4 and Agent Memory before a first engagement.

The post splits the work into two tracks. Platform engineers handle running the database in the customer's cloud (networking, identity, CI/CD, Terraform or OpenTofu, observability, backups and upgrades). Agentic AI engineers work on memory, retrieval, orchestration, evaluation and guardrails inside customer agents, with experience in tools like Mem0, Zep, Letta or Graphiti called a strong plus.

For FDEs, it is a sign that infrastructure vendors, not only AI labs, now need embedded engineers to get agent stacks into production, and that some are turning to contract, on-demand FDE capacity open to applicants anywhere in the world.