Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a senior individual contributor role at a fast-growing, Y Combinator-backed open-source AI observability platform — think "Datadog for LLM engineering." The company sits at the intersection of developer tooling and applied AI, serving a large and rapidly expanding base of engineering teams building production-grade AI agents and applications.

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the primary technical partner for the company's most strategic accounts. You are not support — you are a trusted advisor who understands customer architectures deeply enough to have strong opinions, drive real outcomes, and close the loop between what customers do in production and what the product team should build next.

What You'll Do

• Own 10–20 strategic accounts end-to-end — onboarding, success planning, architecture deep dives, and driving adoption across the full customer lifecycle.

• Guide production readiness — define instrumentation strategies, evaluation setups, data modeling approaches, and security/privacy playbooks for enterprise deployments.

• Act as the voice of the customer internally — synthesise patterns across accounts into concrete product feedback and roadmap input; create a tight signal loop between customer needs and engineering priorities.

• Support self-hosted and on-prem deployments — troubleshoot complex infrastructure configurations, assist with Kubernetes/Docker rollouts, and resolve performance and security issues in customer environments.

• Build scalable enablement assets — integration guides, runbooks, architecture reference patterns, and reusable tooling that reduce time-to-value for new accounts.

• Mentor and lead — help shape the forward-deployment function, mentor junior engineers, and drive technical initiatives end-to-end.

• Travel occasionally to customer sites for key deployments, onboarding sessions, or executive business reviews.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (backend, full-stack, or site reliability), with at least 2 years delivering and operating production systems.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience building or integrating LLM-powered applications in production (prompt engineering, evaluation pipelines, tracing, or model orchestration).

• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript (3+ years) with practical experience building SDKs, integrations, or web services.

• Experience with observability and distributed tracing systems (tracing, logging, metrics) and implementing instrumentation for production services.

• Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with analytics or columnar databases; familiarity with ClickHouse or similar engines strongly preferred.

• Experience with containerisation and cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines); able to deploy and troubleshoot self-hosted/on-prem solutions independently.

• Prior customer-facing technical experience — solutions engineering, forward deployment, professional services, or pre-sales — including direct troubleshooting in customer environments.

• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills; able to present technical concepts clearly to both engineering and business stakeholders.

• Practical knowledge of data privacy, security, and compliance for production LLM deployments (PII handling, retention policies, secure deployments).

• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical projects end-to-end with full ownership.

• Legal right to work in the European Union without employer sponsorship — visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Nice to Have

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

• Background at companies working in AI/ML tooling, developer infrastructure, or data observability.

Location

This role is remote-friendly across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Poland, and the United Kingdom, with a hybrid option available. The primary anchor location is Austria. Occasional travel to customer sites is required.

Note: Candidates must have the legal right to work in the EU without visa sponsorship. Sponsorship is not offered.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: €90,000 – €160,000 per year, depending on experience and location.

• Remote-first culture with a small, senior, high-trust team.

• Direct impact on a platform used by thousands of engineering teams globally.