The OpportunityWe are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to embed with strategic enterprise customers after the sale and turn ambitious platform commitments into production outcomes.
This is a hands-on engineering role-not a traditional consulting, project management, or customer success position. You will work directly inside complex customer environments to understand business and technical goals, design the right solution, write production-quality code, deploy and integrate NexusOne, and help customer teams operate it successfully. You will move between a customer's architecture room, a codebase, a Kubernetes cluster, and an executive status discussion without losing the thread.
Our customers often operate large, regulated data estates with strict requirements around security, governance, resilience, performance, and data sovereignty. Their environments may span legacy platforms, cloud data systems, mainframes, warehouses, lakehouses, and AI applications. The work is rarely turnkey. You will own hard implementation problems through resolution while turning what we learn in the field into reusable product capabilities, automation, and delivery playbooks.
You will partner closely with Forward Deployed Engagement Managers, Solutions Architects, Product Engineering, Customer Reliability Engineering, and customer technical teams. The engagement manager owns the delivery program; you own the engineering build.
What You Will DoDeliver Enterprise Solutions- Embed with strategic customers from post-sale discovery through production rollout, stabilization, and knowledge transfer
- Translate business outcomes and ambiguous customer requirements into clear technical designs, milestones, and working software
- Design, build, test, and deploy customer-specific integrations, data pipelines, platform extensions, migration utilities, and AI-enabled workflows
- Integrate NexusOne with existing enterprise systems across identity, security, governance, data catalog, storage, compute, orchestration, observability, and CI/CD
- Support migrations and modernization across on-premises, private-cloud, public-cloud, and hybrid environments
- Establish production-readiness criteria covering performance, reliability, security, disaster recovery, monitoring, and operational ownership
Engineer in the Customer Environment- Write production-quality code in languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go
- Deploy and troubleshoot distributed systems on Kubernetes using infrastructure-as-code and modern delivery practices
- Diagnose issues across application code, data pipelines, networking, IAM/RBAC, certificates, storage, compute, and customer infrastructure
- Lead technical workstreams during high-severity deployment issues, communicate hypotheses clearly, and drive fact-based root-cause resolution
- Produce high-quality technical artifacts: architecture diagrams, design documents, implementation plans, runbooks, test plans, decision logs, and post-incident reviews
- Work effectively within enterprise controls such as architecture review boards, security assessments, change-management processes, and production-access policies
Build Customer Capability- Pair with customer engineers and architects so they understand the solution and can operate it independently
- Lead technical workshops, design reviews, whiteboarding sessions, and hands-on enablement
- Communicate trade-offs and risks clearly to engineers, architects, delivery leaders, and executives
- Build trusted relationships while maintaining scope discipline and making realistic technical commitments
- Create a clean handoff to Customer Reliability Engineering and Support when the solution moves into steady-state production
Improve the Product and the Motion- Bring structured field feedback to Product and Engineering: recurring deployment friction, integration gaps, reliability issues, and product opportunities
- Distinguish one-off customer requirements from patterns that should become product capabilities
- Convert repeated work into reusable connectors, reference architectures, deployment automation, tests, templates, and playbooks
- Contribute improvements to the core platform when the right solution is product-level rather than customer-specific
- Help define what world-class forward-deployed engineering looks like at NexusOne as the function scales
What Success Looks LikeIn the first 90 days:- Build working knowledge of the NexusOne architecture and deployment model
- Establish credibility with an assigned enterprise customer and the internal engineering team
- Take ownership of a defined technical workstream and ship it into a customer environment
- Produce clear, reusable documentation that reduces dependence on individual engineers
Within 6-12 months:- Lead major technical workstreams from design through production adoption
- Reduce time-to-value for customer deployments while improving quality and predictability
- Enable customer teams to operate delivered solutions with decreasing day-to-day dependence on NexusOne FDEs
- Turn field lessons into reusable automation, product improvements, and delivery patterns
- Protect Product Engineering focus by resolving customer implementation work within the forward-deployed organization and escalating only true product issues
Who You AreRequired- 6+ years of professional software, platform, data, or infrastructure engineering experience, including substantial hands-on ownership of production systems
- Experience in a customer-facing post-sales, professional services, solutions delivery, consulting engineering, resident engineering, or forward-deployed role-or equivalent experience working directly with enterprise users
- Strong programming and software engineering fundamentals, with production proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go
- Experience with modern data infrastructure and distributed systems, such as Spark, Trino/Presto, Iceberg, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, data lakes, or cloud data platforms
- Strong Kubernetes and container experience, including deployment, troubleshooting, configuration, networking, observability, and operational readiness
- Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and infrastructure-as-code practices such as Terraform
- Ability to troubleshoot across system boundaries and stay accountable until the underlying problem is understood and resolved
- Experience navigating large-enterprise constraints such as security reviews, IAM/RBAC, private networking, compliance controls, change management, and multiple stakeholder groups
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to explain complex technical decisions precisely to both engineering and executive audiences
- High agency, sound judgment, low ego, and comfort operating in ambiguous environments where the playbook is still being built
- Willingness to travel to customer sites as engagements require
Strong Differentiators- Deep experience with one or more of Kubernetes, Spark, Trino, Iceberg, Airflow, Ranger, Keycloak, DataHub, Terraform, dbt, Airbyte, Fivetran, or adjacent technologies
- Experience deploying data platforms in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, or the public sector
- Experience with on-premises or hybrid-cloud deployments, including restricted-network or data-sovereignty requirements
- Track record of modernizing Hadoop, Cloudera, MapR, legacy ETL, or complex enterprise data estates
- Experience building production AI or agentic applications on governed enterprise data
- Demonstrated success turning bespoke customer work into reusable software, automation, reference architectures, or product features
- Experience with performance engineering, high availability, disaster recovery, security hardening, or production incident response
- Prior experience in a startup or growth-stage environment where you helped create the operating model rather than inherit it
What This Role Is Not- Not a project manager role. You will plan and communicate your work, but the core expectation is to engineer and ship the solution.
- Not pre-sales solution engineering. You may support continuity from a proof of value, but your center of gravity is post-sale delivery and production adoption.
- Not reactive support. You will troubleshoot hard issues, but you are accountable for building durable solutions and creating a clean production handoff.
- Not bespoke consulting forever. Customer-specific work is necessary; repeated work must become automation, a playbook, or a product improvement.
- Not a role for someone who needs perfect requirements. You will help customers discover the real problem and turn ambiguity into an executable technical plan.
