Principal Forward Deployed Data Scientist - Oil & Gas, Houston

Fundamental; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation with equity

Comprehensive health coverage

Relocation support

Job summary

Fundamental seeks a Principal Forward Deployed Data Scientist - Oil & Gas in Houston to drive the adoption of NEXUS and solve complex challenges for Houston-based clients. You’ll bridge customer needs and product roadmaps, working across IT, C-suite, and data teams to deliver crucial value.

You’ll lead end-to-end ML pipelines, benchmark against baselines, and collaborate with research and product teams to turn insights into actionable enhancements for enterprise decision-making.

Qualifications

• PhD or master in CS/Math/Stats or equivalent statistical literacy.
• 7+ years as a technical individual contributor in Data Science / ML.
• Experience working with customers or business stakeholders in enterprise settings.
• Proficient with Docker, orchestration, and building performant APIs (FastAPI/Flask).
• Deep understanding of data handling (PySpark, Pandas) and memory optimization.

Responsibilities

• Deploy into production use cases with measurable ROI.
• Benchmark against client baselines (XGBoost, LightGBM) with data engineering work.
• Collaborate with research and product teams to inform roadmaps.
• Define technical strategy, prevent data leakage, and manage last-mile integration.
• Align with Sales and Solution Architect teams to explain predictions to business users.

Skills

Customer-facing communication

Data science

ML engineering

End-to-end ML pipeline

Memory optimization

PySpark

Pandas

Strong collaboration

Oil & Gas domain knowledge

Education

PhD or Master in CS/Math/Stats

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

FastAPI/Flask

Job description

About Fundamental

Fundamental is an AI company pioneering the future of enterprise decision-making. Founded by DeepMind alumni, Fundamental has developed NEXUS - the world's most powerful Large Tabular Model (LTM) - purpose-built for the structured records that actually drive enterprise decisions. Backed by world class investors and trusted by Fortune 100 companies, Fundamental unlocks trillions of dollars of value by giving businesses the Power to Predict.

At Fundamental, you'll work on unprecedented technical challenges in foundation model development and build technology that transforms how the world's largest companies make decisions. This is your opportunity to be part of a category-defining company from the ground-up. Join the team defining the future of enterprise AI.

About the role

Fundamental is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Data Scientist - Oil & Gas, Houston to facilitate the adoption of NEXUS and collaborate with customers to address complex technical challenges with an initial focus on Houston-based Oil & Gas customers.

The Principal Data Scientist is an integral part of our FDE team, which is dedicated to driving the successful deployment of Fundamental products and proving value over legacy baselines or net new use cases. They work hand-in-hand with customers from the Proof of Value stage to post-implementation, ensuring our solutions run securely in the client's production heartbeat.

In this role, you'll manage customer relations involving multiple stakeholders (IT, C-suite, and data science teams) and function as a key bridge, translating field insights into our product roadmap.

Key responsibilities

• You’ll individually help deploy into production use cases with considerable business impact, moving from "science experiments" to definitive ROI
• You’ll work on rigorous head-to-head benchmarking against client baselines (XGBoost, LightGBM), executing the work of data engineering, feature engineering, and validation
• You’ll work in collaboration with our research and product teams to translate operational pain points and data anomalies into essential inputs for the Fundamental roadmap
• You’ll be involved in technical strategy to identify the right business problems, prevent data leakage, and handle the "last mile" integration (VPC, on-prem, air-gapped)
• Your collaboration with the Sales and Solution Architect teams will help align diverse stakeholders and explain predictions to business users

Must have

• You hold a PhD / master in CS / Math / Stats or you have equivalent deep statistical literacy
• You have 7+ years as a technical individual contributor in Data Science, Machine Learning, Applied Science, or ML Engineering
• You have strong experience working directly with customers or business stakeholders, ideally in complex enterprise or industrial environments
• You have experience with containerization (Docker), orchestration, and writing performant APIs (FastAPI/Flask)
• You master the end-to-end pipeline, from framing, pre-processing, ml algorithm and validation strategies
• You have a deep understanding of data handling (PySpark, Pandas) and memory optimization
• You have demonstrated experience optimizing models for a specific business problem
• You hold strong communication skills with an ability to translate architectural nuances into clear business value

Nice to have

• Experience with PyTorch and cloud-native ML pipelines (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Prior experience or understanding of Oil & Gas, energy, utilities, industrials, logistics, or heavy asset environments
• Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Staff Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, or Staff Data Scientist
• Industry-based subject matter expertise

Benefits

• Competitive compensation with salary and equity
• Comprehensive health coverage for you and your dependents, including medical, dental, vision, and 401K
• Paid parental leave for all new parents, inclusive of adoptive and surrogate journeys
• Relocation support for employees moving to join the team in one of our office locations
• A mission-driven, low-ego culture that values diversity of thought, ownership, and bias toward action