Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a senior, customer-facing engineering role at a fast-growing open-source LLM engineering platform — think observability and evaluation tooling for AI applications and agents. You will be the primary technical partner for the company's most strategic accounts, owning the relationship from first call through production scale.
You are not a support engineer. You are an engineer with deep enough architectural understanding to have — and act on — real technical opinions inside customer environments.
What You'll Do
Own 10–20 strategic accounts — onboarding, success planning, and deep dives into their AI architecture; drive adoption across the full product lifecycle.
Guide production readiness — instrumentation strategy, evaluation setup, data modeling, security and privacy considerations, and operational playbooks.
Serve as the feedback loop — translate what customers encounter in production into concrete, prioritized input for the product and engineering teams.
Lead self-hosted and on-premises deployments — configure, troubleshoot, and optimize deployments in customer-controlled environments (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-native stacks).
Create reusable assets — integration guides, architectural reference patterns, runbooks, and best-practice documentation that scale your impact beyond individual accounts.
Mentor and lead — help define the forward-deployment function, contribute to hiring, and support more junior team members on complex engagements.
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 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 — logging, metrics, instrumentation for production services.
Strong SQL skills and familiarity with analytics or columnar databases; experience with ClickHouse or similar analytics engines is a strong plus.
Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines; able to deploy and troubleshoot self-hosted/on-prem solutions.
Prior customer-facing engineering experience — solutions engineering, forward deployment, professional services, or pre-sales — including direct troubleshooting in customer environments.
Fluent written and verbal English; able to communicate technical concepts clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Practical knowledge of data privacy, security, and compliance for production LLM deployments (PII handling, retention policies, secure deployments).
Willingness to travel occasionally to customer sites for deployments, onboarding, or on-site troubleshooting.
Must have the legal right to work in the European Union without employer visa sponsorship.
Nice to Have
Experience contributing to or operating within open-source projects — OSS workflows, issue triage, and community collaboration.
Background at companies in the AI/ML tooling, observability, or data infrastructure space.
Location
This is a hybrid remote role based in Austria (or elsewhere in Europe). Team members are distributed across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Sweden, and Poland. Occasional travel to customer sites is expected.
Visa sponsorship is not available. Candidates must have the right to work in the EU without employer sponsorship.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $90,000 – $160,000 USD annually (or local currency equivalent)
Early-stage equity participation
Opportunity to shape a core go-to-market function at a high-growth, developer-beloved open-source product
Work closely with a lean, senior team with backgrounds including ex-Google, ex-Microsoft, ex-Snowflake, and leading research institutions