Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

About Nexus

You don't have an AI story if you don't have your data story. That's where NexusOne comes in.

We're the converged data platform for the AI era — composable by design, built on an open-source foundation, and AI-native from the ground up. One identity, one governance envelope, one operational layer across every mainframe, data lake, warehouse, and streaming system in the business. For the first time, enterprises can bring their existing stack along instead of rebuilding it — and still give AI agents full context across the estate.

What we stand for is simple: sovereign data, interoperable systems, decoupled intelligence — delivered the way modern software should be. No rip-and-replace. No multi-year transformation. Our CEO Anu Jain puts it well: we turn the "ball of yarn" of data integrations into a unified engine — less like assembling car parts, more like buying the car ready to drive. 85+ open-source tools pre-integrated. AI-native automations that deploy and self-heal the stack without human toil. Forward-deployed engineers who build shoulder-to-shoulder with customer teams — hands on keyboards, not just on decks.

It's working, and fast. We're tripling revenue year over year, backed by Insight Partners, and running in production in environments most vendors won't touch. Our platform processes credit risk data for 90%+ of US small businesses — 40M+ — every month. Intent signals for 300M+ subscribers monthly for Africa's largest telco. The data and AI layer for a Top 3 US bank.

We're 100+ people across the US and India, headquartered in Atlanta. We think big, move fast, and don't mistake activity for progress. We hire people who'd rather ship the rocket than brief someone on it.

Check out this podcast of Anu talking about our solution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8g50sv5GhQ

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to embed with strategic enterprise customers after the sale and turn ambitious platform commitments into production outcomes.

This is a hands-on engineering role—not a traditional consulting, project management, or customer success position. You will work directly inside complex customer environments to understand business and technical goals, design the right solution, write production-quality code, deploy and integrate NexusOne, and help customer teams operate it successfully. You will move between a customer's architecture room, a codebase, a Kubernetes cluster, and an executive status discussion without losing the thread.

Our customers often operate large, regulated data estates with strict requirements around security, governance, resilience, performance, and data sovereignty. Their environments may span legacy platforms, cloud data systems, mainframes, warehouses, lakehouses, and AI applications. The work is rarely turnkey. You will own hard implementation problems through resolution while turning what we learn in the field into reusable product capabilities, automation, and delivery playbooks.

You will partner closely with Forward Deployed Engagement Managers, Solutions Architects, Product Engineering, Customer Reliability Engineering, and customer technical teams. The engagement manager owns the delivery program; you own the engineering build.

Responsibilities

• Deliver Enterprise Solutions
• Embed with strategic customers from post-sale discovery through production rollout, stabilization, and knowledge transfer
• Translate business outcomes and ambiguous customer requirements into clear technical designs, milestones, and working software
• Design, build, test, and deploy customer-specific integrations, data pipelines, platform extensions, migration utilities, and AI-enabled workflows
• Integrate NexusOne with existing enterprise systems across identity, security, governance, data catalog, storage, compute, orchestration, observability, and CI/CD
• Support migrations and modernization across on-premises, private-cloud, public-cloud, and hybrid environments
• Establish production-readiness criteria covering performance, reliability, security, disaster recovery, monitoring, and operational ownership
• Engineer in the Customer Environment
• Write production-quality code in languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go
• Deploy and troubleshoot distributed systems on Kubernetes using infrastructure-as-code and modern delivery practices
• Diagnose issues across application code, data pipelines, networking, IAM/RBAC, certificates, storage, compute, and customer infrastructure
• Lead technical workstreams during high-severity deployment issues, communicate hypotheses clearly, and drive fact-based root-cause resolution
• Produce high-quality technical artifacts: architecture diagrams, design documents, implementation plans, runbooks, test plans, decision logs, and post-incident reviews
• Work effectively within enterprise controls such as architecture review boards, security assessments, change-management processes, and production-access policies
• Build Customer Capability
• Pair with customer engineers and architects so they understand the solution and can operate it independently
• Lead technical workshops, design reviews, whiteboarding sessions, and hands-on enablement
• Communicate trade-offs and risks clearly to engineers, architects, delivery leaders, and executives
• Build trusted relationships while maintaining scope discipline and making realistic technical commitments
• Create a clean handoff to Customer Reliability Engineering and Support when the solution moves into steady-state production
• Improve the Product and the Motion
• Bring structured field feedback to Product and Engineering: recurring deployment friction, integration gaps, reliability issues, and product opportunities
• Distinguish one-off customer requirements from patterns that should become product capabilities
• Convert repeated work into reusable connectors, reference architectures, deployment automation, tests, templates, and playbooks
• Contribute improvements to the core platform when the right solution is product-level rather than customer-specific
• Help define what world-class forward-deployed engineering looks like at NexusOne as the function scales
• What Success Looks Like
• In the first 90 days:
• Build working knowledge of the NexusOne architecture and deployment model
• Establish credibility with an assigned enterprise customer and the internal engineering team
• Take ownership of a defined technical workstream and ship it into a customer environment
• Produce clear, reusable documentation that reduces dependence on individual engineers
• Within 6–12 months:
• Lead major technical workstreams from design through production adoption
• Reduce time-to-value for customer deployments while improving quality and predictability
• Enable customer teams to operate delivered solutions with decreasing day-to-day dependence on NexusOne FDEs
• Turn field lessons into reusable automation, product improvements, and delivery patterns
• Protect Product Engineering focus by resolving customer implementation work within the forward-deployed organization and escalating only true product issues

Requirements

• Required
• 6+ years of professional software, platform, data, or infrastructure engineering experience, including substantial hands-on ownership of production systems
• Experience in a customer-facing post-sales, professional services, solutions delivery, consulting engineering, resident engineering, or forward-deployed role—or equivalent experience working directly with enterprise users
• Strong programming and software engineering fundamentals, with production proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go
• Experience with modern data infrastructure and distributed systems, such as Spark, Trino/Presto, Iceberg, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, data lakes, or cloud data platforms
• Strong Kubernetes and container experience, including deployment, troubleshooting, configuration, networking, observability, and operational readiness
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and infrastructure-as-code practices such as Terraform
• Ability to troubleshoot across system boundaries and stay accountable until the underlying problem is understood and resolved
• Experience navigating large-enterprise constraints such as security reviews, IAM/RBAC, private networking, compliance controls, change management, and multiple stakeholder groups
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to explain complex technical decisions precisely to both engineering and executive audiences
• High agency, sound judgment, low ego, and comfort operating in ambiguous environments where the playbook is still being built
• Willingness to travel to customer sites as engagements require
• Strong Differentiators
• Deep experience with one or more of Kubernetes, Spark, Trino, Iceberg, Airflow, Ranger, Keycloak, DataHub, Terraform, dbt, Airbyte, Fivetran, or adjacent technologies
• Experience deploying data platforms in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, or the public sector
• Experience with on-premises or hybrid-cloud deployments, including restricted-network or data-sovereignty requirements
• Track record of modernizing Hadoop, Cloudera, MapR, legacy ETL, or complex enterprise data estates
• Experience building production AI or agentic applications on governed enterprise data
• Demonstrated success turning bespoke customer work into reusable software, automation, reference architectures, or product features
• Experience with performance engineering, high availability, disaster recovery, security hardening, or production incident response
• Prior experience in a startup or growth-stage environment where you helped create the operating model rather than inherit it
• What This Role Is Not
• Not a project manager role. You will plan and communicate your work, but the core expectation is to engineer and ship the solution.
• Not pre-sales solution engineering. You may support continuity from a proof of value, but your center of gravity is post-sale delivery and production adoption.
• Not reactive support. You will troubleshoot hard issues, but you are accountable for building durable solutions and creating a clean production handoff.
• Not bespoke consulting forever. Customer-specific work is necessary; repeated work must become automation, a playbook, or a product improvement.
• Not a role for someone who needs perfect requirements. You will help customers discover the real problem and turn ambiguity into an executable technical plan.
• Why You’ll Love Working at Nexus
• At Nexus, we value people who want to grow — and support each other while doing so.
• You can expect:
• A collaborative team culture built on curiosity and respect
• Challenging work where your contributions clearly matter
• A leadership team that invests in learning and development
• The opportunity to work at the intersection of cloud, data, and AI innovation
• Ready to Apply?
• If this role sounds like a great fit — or even close to one — we’d love to hear from you. We know that no candidate checks every single box, and we’re excited to meet people who bring curiosity, talent, and a desire to build meaningful work together.