Head of Forward Deployed 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

The Company

The future of data–especially for agentic/LLM consumption–lies in decentralization, and autonomous data products are the proven approach for implementing it at enterprise scale. Nextdata OS is an autonomous data product operating system built to meet the challenge of safely decentralizing data at scale for humans and agents.

We envision a world where AI systems can safely and reliably act on data because the context of the business travels with the data itself. In this world, domain teams own the meaning, quality, and policies of their data, while the enterprise maintains interoperability and trust across organizational and technological boundaries.

Our purpose is to transform how organizations create, share, discover, and use data—so that data becomes a trusted, governed product that both people and AI systems can use directly. By turning fragmented datasets into autonomous data products, we enable organizations to move from brittle pipelines and manual coordination to governed, machine-usable data at scale.

Nextdata OS makes data products first-class primitives of the data architecture. Autonomous data products carry their own semantics, policies, quality signals, and delivery interfaces, exposing domain-centric context that applications, analytics, and AI agents can safely consume. A shared control plane ensures that while domains operate independently, semantics, governance, and interoperability remain coherent across the enterprise.

The world of enterprise data is inherently complex. Data lives across platforms, organizations, and trust boundaries. It is constantly evolving, used in many different modes, and increasingly consumed by machines rather than humans. Traditional approaches—centralizing data, enforcing governance through process, and managing meaning through documentation—struggle to keep pace with this reality.

Our mission is to make data capable of governing and describing itself, so that both humans and AI can discover, trust, and use it correctly. By embedding semantics, policies, and context directly into autonomous data products, we help organizations transform fragmented data estates into reliable foundations for analytics, applications, and AI.

About The Role

As Nextdata's founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you are our senior technical leader in the field. You take Nextdata OS from first proof of concept to production inside some of the world's largest data organizations. You design the solution, run the delivery, and lead the team that builds it: Nextdata engineers alongside contractors and system integrator partners, up to around ten people on a single account.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not an account management role. Our sales team owns the commercial relationship; you own making the customer successful, and you'll build the forward deployed function that every future deployment runs on.

The Impact You Will Have

• Architect the solution. Turn a customer's business problem into a concrete design on Nextdata OS: the autonomous data products, how they integrate with the customer's existing platforms, and the analytics, applications, and AI agents built on top.

• Run the deployment. Own delivery end to end: define success criteria with the customer, plan and sequence the work, unblock the team, and get to production.

• Lead the team on the account. Direct and mentor the forward deployed engineers, contractors, and SI partners working with each customer, up to ten people per account.

• Stay hands-on. Write code, debug in customer environments, and build the first version yourself when that's the fastest path.

• Shape what we sell. Join technical discovery and PoC scoping with sales so that what we commit to is what we can deliver, and help write scopes of work.

• Feed the roadmap. Bring what you learn in the field back to product and engineering, and partner with them on features and gaps.

• Build the playbook. Define how Nextdata does forward deployed engineering: the methods, tooling, and hiring bar that future deployments will follow.

You Are The Right Fit If You Have

• 8+ years in technical, customer-facing engineering (forward deployed engineering, deployment strategy, solution architecture, or technical consulting), taking data platforms to production in large enterprises.

• A track record of leading delivery teams of 5–10+ people, including contractors or SI partners, on complex customer deployments.

• Strong hands-on engineering skills: Python and SQL, modern data platforms (such as Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, or dbt), and cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Solution architecture judgment: you can design for a customer's messy reality and explain the trade-offs to engineers and executives alike.

• Project management discipline: you turn ambiguous goals into plans, milestones, and shipped outcomes.

• Comfort working with stakeholders from individual engineers to Chief Data Officers.

• Willingness to travel up to 25%, more during peak times.

Nice To Have

• Forward deployed experience at Palantir or a similar company.

• Experience deploying an early-stage product that’s still evolving.

• Familiarity with data mesh, data products, semantic layers, or Kubernetes.

• Experience building AI or LLM applications on enterprise data.

Our Benefits

We are an early-stage company, but we don't subsist on ramen! We are an experienced team with families. We provide $2,000 for your home workspace setup, company laptop, premium health, vision, and dental insurance coverage for you and your family. As an early-stage start-up, you will receive a compensation package that includes a competitive salary and equity i