Head of Forward-Deployed Data Engineering

Nextdata; Kansas; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home workspace stipend

Premium health/vision/dental insurance

Company laptop

Job summary

Nextdata is seeking a founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to drive production deployments of Nextdata OS for large enterprises. You will design the solution, lead delivery, and manage a team of engineers and partners on complex data deployments.

This hands-on leadership role shapes engagements and ensures customer success. You will stay hands-on when needed, co-create scopes with sales, mentor the team, and feed insights back to product and engineering.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in technical, customer-facing engineering in large enterprises.
• Experience leading delivery teams of 5–10+ people, including contractors or SI partners.
• Hands-on engineering skills with Python, SQL, and modern data platforms.
• Ability to design for messy real-world deployments and explain trade-offs.
• Strong project management to turn goals into plans and shipped outcomes.
• Comfort working with stakeholders from engineers to Chief Data Officers.

Responsibilities

• Architect the solution on Nextdata OS integrating autonomous data products with client platforms.
• Run end-to-end delivery, plan work, unblock the team, and drive production readiness.
• Lead and mentor forward deployed engineers and partners on the account.
• Stay hands-on, debug in customer environments, and build initial versions when fastest.
• Shape scope with sales through technical discovery and PoC scoping.
• Feed field learnings back to product/engineering and help define roadmap.

Skills

Technical leadership

Delivery management

Solution architecture

Program management

Stakeholder management

Travel up to 25%

Tools

Python

SQL

Snowflake

Databricks

Spark

dbt

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Nextdata is seeking a founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to drive production deployments of Nextdata OS for large enterprises. You will design the solution, lead delivery, and manage a team of engineers and partners on complex data deployments.

This hands-on leadership role shapes engagements and ensures customer success. You will stay hands-on when needed, co-create scopes with sales, mentor the team, and feed insights back to product and engineering.