Forward Deployed Financial Engineer
Description
Come build the future of finance with Datarails. We're a global, AI-powered FinanceOS company helping finance teams transform the way they work. By combining intelligent automation, AI, and seamless integrations with the tools finance teams already know and trust, we empower organizations to make faster, smarter decisions with confidence. With approximately 350 employees worldwide, we're building the next generation of finance technology - where innovation, collaboration, and customer success go hand in hand.
If you're looking for a fantastic opportunity to join a growing startup in a role with massive impact, we would love to meet you!
This position is 100% remote, based anywhere in the United States. No sponsorship or relocation assistance is available.
About the Role
We are hiring for two focus areas on this team. This posting is for the Platform focus. If you are stronger in building AI agents and applications, see the Applied AI focus posting for the same role.
As a Forward Deployed Financial Engineer, you will deliver Datarails' AI transformation engagements for existing customers.
After a customer completes implementation, you will work closely with their team to understand how they operate, identify where AI can create meaningful value, and determine what Datarails can build with them. You will take an active role in bringing that vision to life.
The solutions may include AI skills, routines, applications, agents, or workflows. This is a highly hands-on role for someone who enjoys working directly with customers, navigating ambiguity, and building practical solutions that solve real business problems.
In the Platform focus, you own how those solutions get deployed and run inside customer environments: integrations, authentication, secrets, hosting, monitoring and the release process. You make what the team builds reliable, secure and maintainable after we leave, and you build the tooling and reusable components that let the team deliver more per person.
You will also serve as an important bridge between customers and our R&D and Product teams, helping translate customer needs into scalable capabilities and influencing the future of the Datarails platform.
What You’ll Do
- Own how customer solutions are deployed and run: integrations, authentication, secrets, hosting, monitoring and the release process.
- Build internal tooling, templates and reusable components that shorten delivery time and raise the quality floor across the team.
- Build and deliver customer-facing solutions, including AI skills, routines, workflows, applications, and agents.
- Join discovery sessions with customers to understand their systems, data and constraints, and turn those into a deployable design.
- Take ownership of projects from recommendation through development, delivery and handoff.
- Work directly with customers throughout the engagement, translating business requirements into practical technical solutions.
- Engage customer IT and finance teams in change management, so what we build is adopted and stays running.
- Build prototypes and products that address immediate customer needs while identifying opportunities for broader reuse.
- Partner closely with Datarails Customer Success, Product and R&D teams to troubleshoot challenges, communicate customer requirements, and influence product development.
- Identify recurring customer needs that could evolve into scalable platform capabilities.
- Clearly explain technical concepts, tradeoffs, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Document solutions, learnings, and repeatable approaches that can improve future customer engagements.
What We’re Looking For
Two things come first, whatever the focus:
- You are good in front of the customer. You can run a technical discovery with a customer's IT and finance teams, explain a hosting or security tradeoff to a CFO, and hold the room when the plan changes. Half of this job is that.
- You ship. You own a problem from the first conversation through to a working solution the customer actually uses.
Then three technical areas, weighted in this order for the Platform focus:
- DevOps and infrastructure. You can take a solution from a working prototype to something that runs in a customer's environment: APIs and integrations, cloud deployment, CI/CD, authentication, secrets, observability.
- Product engineering. You build software people use, and you build the tools that let other engineers ship faster.
- Applied AI. You have worked with LLM-based systems, agents and tool use, and you understand what they need from the infrastructure around them.
Also:
- Production experience in Python or TypeScript, with SQL and REST APIs, and at least one major cloud.
- Experience integrating with business systems through their APIs, and handling authentication and secrets properly while doing it.
- Ability to translate ambiguous business and technical constraints into clear, defensible recommendations.
- A product-oriented mindset and system-level thinking, with an interest in building solutions that may evolve beyond a single customer use case.
- Comfort working independently, managing projects, and taking ownership through to handoff.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with Product, R&D, Customer Success, and other cross-functional teams.
- Curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to experiment, learn quickly, and solve problems creatively.
Helpful Experience
- Forward deployed engineering, hands-on technical consulting, platform or DevOps roles, or early engineering roles with broad implementation responsibility.
- Deploying LLM-based systems for real users, including monitoring and evaluation in production.
- Finance, accounting, FP&A, Excel-based workflows, or integrations with ERP and other business systems. You will learn the Office of the CFO quickly here; you do not need to arrive from it.
What We Offer
- A collaborative, team-oriented environment, the ability to own your own schedule (work your local time zone), and the opportunity to grow at Datarails over many years
- Base compensation - The target base salary range will be between $120-150k USD per year, based on multiple factors including prior experience, skills, and location. We are open to candidates with varying levels of experience.
- Parental leave
- Meaningful equity
- 401(k) plan with up to 4% match
- Top-of-the-line healthcare (medical, vision, and dental), with 100% paid coverage for employees + generous coverage for dependents
- Generous PTO + 12 paid company holidays
- Life insurance
- And more!
We want to make sure everyone has an equal chance to participate and make a difference. Datarails is an equal opportunity employer and prioritizes building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants of any type and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, genetic information or characteristic, gender identity and expression, veteran status, or other non-job related characteristics or other prohibited grounds specified in applicable federal, state, and local laws. Datarails’ policy is to comply with all applicable laws related to nondiscrimination and equal opportunity and will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.
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