Forward Deployed Engineer (Rust)

Who We Are Looking For

• An exceptional engineer.
• A problem solver who starts with customer problems and solves them with technology.
• A thinker who challenges the status quo, rejects the current world model, and builds better for everyone.
• A positive force who asks what's possible instead of focusing on limitations.
• Someone who views work as meaningful, not just a job.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, leading by creating clarity.
• Passionate about high performance with high standards.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in engineering roles, with focus on deploying data, search, and AI systems in enterprise environments.
• Experience designing, implementing, and scaling production database engines, distributed systems, search engines, and data & AI pipelines.
• Track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions in customer-facing contexts.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to ramp up quickly and deliver impact.
• Contributions to open-source projects preferred.
• Experience with Apache infrastructure, CNCF stack, or cloud-native development.
• Deep knowledge of databases, data warehousing, data lakes, search, virtualization, and mesh principles.
• Proficiency with Databricks, Snowflake, Starburst, Dremio, ElasticSearch, or similar.
• Strong SQL skills in queries, syntax, modeling, and optimizations.
• Familiarity with data storage like HDFS, Amazon S3, and relational databases.
• Skills in data integration, including ETL/ELT, ingestion, and transformation.
• Ability to tune performance and optimize systems.
• Knowledge of data security, privacy, authentication, authorization, and encryption.
• Problem-solving for complex data challenges.
• Presentation skills for technical and executive audiences.
• Ability to explain concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Relationship-building with customers and partners.
• Willingness to travel 20%+ based on customer needs.

In This Role, You'll

• Embed with enterprise customers and partners to deploy Spice.ai OSS/Enterprise and Cloud Platform in production.
• Build, configure, and optimize proof-of-concepts and deployments for performance, scalability, and security.
• Collaborate with engineering to incorporate customer feedback into core product features.
• Resolve technical blockers, debug issues, and extend Spice.ai capabilities on-site or remotely.
• Design end-to-end architectures using Spice.ai for data querying, search, and AI inference.
• Identify expansion opportunities and drive adoption of new features.
• Work side-by-side with founders as a leader in customer success engineering.
• Contribute to Spice.ai OSS improvements based on real-world usage.
• Own initiatives to refine offerings and deliver superior developer experiences.

Your First 90 Days

• First week: Deploy a Spice.ai instance for a customer scenario and fix a deployment issue.
• First month: Ramp up, lead a POC deployment, and contribute optimizations to Spice.ai OSS.
• 30-60 days: Take ownership of a customer deployment area, from architecture to production rollout.
• 60-90 days: Propose and execute a technical strategy for scaling customer integrations.