Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

Join a fast-growing open-source LLM observability platform — think the Datadog of AI infrastructure — trusted by a large share of Fortune 50 companies and thousands of engineering teams worldwide. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the primary technical partner for the company's most strategic accounts. You own the full customer lifecycle: from first onboarding call through production-scale deployment. You are not support — you are a trusted technical advisor with deep architectural opinions who acts on them.

What You'll Do

• Own 10–20 strategic accounts — run onboarding, success planning, and deep dives into each customer's AI architecture, driving adoption across the full lifecycle.
• Guide production readiness — develop instrumentation strategies, evaluation setups, data modeling approaches, security/privacy frameworks, and operational playbooks.
• Close the product feedback loop — synthesize patterns across accounts and translate them into concrete product insights that directly influence the engineering roadmap.
• Enable self-hosted and on-prem deployments — deploy, configure, and troubleshoot the platform in customer environments (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-native).
• Write and contribute reusable assets — integration guides, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and code samples that scale your impact beyond individual accounts.
• Mentor and lead — drive technical initiatives, support junior engineers, and help establish best practices for the forward-deployed function.

What We're Looking For

Required

• Legal right to work in the European Union without employer sponsorship (no visa sponsorship available).
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (backend, full-stack, or SRE), with at least 2 years delivering production systems.
• 2+ years hands-on experience building or integrating LLM-powered applications in production (prompt engineering, evaluation, tracing, or model orchestration).
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript with 3+ years building SDKs, integrations, or web services.
• Solid experience with observability and distributed tracing systems; ability to implement and advise on instrumentation for production services.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with analytics/columnar databases; familiarity with ClickHouse or similar analytics engines strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines; comfortable deploying and troubleshooting self-hosted or on-prem solutions.
• Customer-facing background — solutions engineering, forward deployment, professional services, or pre-sales — including direct troubleshooting in customer environments.
• Fluent English (written and verbal); able to communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical knowledge of data privacy, security, and compliance considerations for production LLM deployments (PII handling, retention policies, secure deployments).
• Willingness to travel occasionally to customer sites for deployments, onboarding, or troubleshooting.

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to or operating within open-source projects (OSS workflows, issue triage, community collaboration).

Location

This role is open to candidates based in the EU or UK (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Spain, Sweden, Poland, United Kingdom). The team operates on a hybrid/remote basis. Occasional travel to customer sites is expected.

Visa sponsorship is not available. Candidates must have the legal right to work in the EU without employer sponsorship.

Compensation

Salary range: $90,000 – $160,000 USD annually, depending on experience and location. The company offers competitive compensation aligned with the seniority and impact of this role.