Senior Field Engineer (Pre-Sales/Forward Deployed)

Cognite - AI for Industry; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Health, dental, vision & disability

Job summary

Cognite Houston is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer/Pre-Sales to fuse industrial AI with real-world deployments. You will partner with Account Executives to move strategy to live demos using Fast AI Prototyping and Cognite Atlas AI™ and Cognite Data Fusion®.

You’ll lead design of industrial AI agents and craft high-level use cases for executive demos. Travel up to 50% is required as projects demand on-site work, with collaboration across field, product, and customers to deliver

Qualifications

• 3+ years in forward deployed engineering/pre-sales engineering roles in enterprise SaaS, cloud platforms, or industrial software.
• Strong engineering background; CS/Engineering fields preferred.
• Solid Python foundation and understanding of GenAI (embeddings, RAG, prompt chaining).
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% as needed.

Responsibilities

• Client Engagement & Moving Strategy to Reality: lead technical work to transform strategy into live demos via Fast AI Prototyping, Atlas AI™ and Cognite Data Fusion®.
• Agentic Solution Development: design and implement industrial AI agents with scalable, feasible solutions.
• Technical Representation & Use Case Design: run workshops, craft high-level use cases, deliver compelling demos.
• Product Innovation & Field Leadership: bridge field learnings to product requirements and best practices.

Skills

Client engagement

Technical leadership

AI prototyping

Atlas AI

Python

LLMs

Travel willingness

Education

Bachelor's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Cognite Atlas AI

Cognite Data Fusion

Job description

What Cognite is: Relentless to achieve

Cognite operates at the forefront of industrial digitalization, building AI, and data solutions that solve the world’s hardest, highest-impact problems. With unmatched industrial heritage and a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities, including low-code AI agents, Cognite accelerates the digital transformation to drive operational improvements.

We thrive in challenges. We challenge assumptions. We execute with speed and ownership. If you view obstacles as signals to step forward - not backwards - you'll feel right at home here.

Our Moonshot is bold: Unlock $100B in customer value by 2035, and redefine how global industry works. Join us in this venture where AI and data meet ingenuity, and together, we will forge the path to a smarter, more connected industrial future.

How you’ll demonstrate Ownership

• Client Engagement & Moving Strategy to Reality: Partner with Account Executives to prioritize strategic opportunities and act as the technical lead for complex engagements. You will move clients from high-level strategy to live, functioning versions of Cognite's solutions through Fast AI Prototyping via Cognite Atlas AI™ and Cognite Data Fusion®.
• Agentic Solution Development: Lead the design and implementation of first-of-their-kind industrial agents. You will leverage the Atlas AI workbench to automate complex industrial workflows, ensuring solutions are technically feasible, scalable, and grounded in the contextualized data foundation of our Industrial Knowledge Graph.
• Technical Representation & Use Case Design: Lead use case workshops and briefings, translating functional and non-functional requirements into deliverable high-level use cases. You will build executive confidence by delivering client-focused demos and reference architectures that prove the ROI of Industrial AI.
• Product Innovation & Field Leadership: Act as the critical bridge between the field and Cognite’s Product organization. Translate "field friction" and deployment learnings into actionable product requirements and scalable best practices that strengthen Cognite’s position as the leader in Industrial DataOps.

The Impact you bring to Cognite

• Industrial Architecture Expertise: Ability to design scalable architectures that unify siloed IT/OT/ET data into a single source of truth using Cognite Data Fusion®.
• Agentic AI Proficiency: Demonstrated experience building with LLMs (Gemini, Claude, GPT-4) and a deep understanding of the Agentic AI landscape to create trusted, mission-critical industrial agents via Cognite Atlas AI™.
• Full-Stack Solution Engineering: Ability to orchestrate and build end-to-end prototypes-inintegrating GenAI components, CDF data models, and legacy customer systems-using scalable software practices and open-source AI frameworks.
• Technical Evangelism & Strategic Influence: The ability to distill complex technical AI solutions into compelling, value-driven narratives. You can pivot seamlessly between deep architectural sessions with engineers and strategy briefings with C-level executives.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years in forward deployed engineering/pre-sales engineering roles ideally in enterprise SaaS, cloud platforms, or industrial software companies.
• Strong engineering background. Preferred fields include but are not limited to Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, and Machine Learning.
• A strong foundation in Python and a deep understanding of the GenAI landscape (embeddings, RAG, and prompt chaining).
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Ability and interest to travel up to 50% as needed to be "on the ground" where the impact happens.

Preferred Experience

• Education or experience in the industrial space (e.g., Petroleum, Chemical, Mechanical, or Control System Engineering).
• Previous customer facing or sales experience.
• You’ve worked with "messy" real-world variables from the Industries we work in (Energy, Oil and Gas, Chemicals, Life Sciences, Discrete) and understand, for example, why data quality in a refinery is harder than data quality in a web app.
• You are excited to bridge the gap between traditional heavy industry and the future of Autonomous Operations via Cognite Data Fusion® and Agentic AI.

A snapshot of our many perks and benefits as a Cogniter

• Competitive compensation
• 401(k) with employer matching
• Competitive health, dental, vision & disability coverages for employees and all dependents
• We're globally recognized domain experts with an international presence that spans Phoenix, Houston, Oslo Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Abu Dhabi.

Cognite is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment at work and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive the same level of consideration for employment.