Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer Location:REMOTE Direct Hire
About the Role We are hiring a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with customer data and systems while building and owning production-grade pipelines and APIs that become part of the core product. This role blends forward-deployed engineering with platform and API development, and is ideal for engineers who enjoy working close to real-world use cases while maintaining a strong product and systems mindset. You’ll work at the boundary between customers and product, directly shaping how the platform evolves.
What You’ll DoCustomer-Facing Forward Deployed Engineering
Work directly with customers’ technical teams to understand data sources, schemas, and system constraints.
Design and implement solutions using real customer data, ensuring reliability, correctness, and scalability.
Act as a technical partner during onboarding, product configuration and integration phases.
Own technical solution design and implementation for customer integrations, from initial data understanding through production deployment.
Data Pipelines & Transformations
Design, build, and maintain ETL/data pipelines that ingest, clean, and transform data from multiple sources (databases, APIs, files, events).
Define data models and transformation logic that scale across customers and use cases.
Ensure data quality, validation, and observability throughout the pipeline.
Platform Engineering & Core Capabilities
Build and evolve core platform capabilities that power integrations, data flows, and product features, with APIs as one of the primary interfaces.
Design, implement, and optimize Python-based systems for data processing, transformation, and orchestration across the platform.
Develop and maintain APIs, services, and workers that expose platform functionality to customers and internal product components.
Build shared libraries, frameworks, and tooling that support scalable data pipelines, integrations, front-end and core service development.
Identify and address performance, scalability, and memory efficiency concerns across Python services, data processing workflows, and background jobs.
Partner with full-stack, data, and platform engineers to improve system reliability, developer experience, and operational efficiency.
From Customer Work to Product Capabilities
Identify common patterns across customer implementations and abstract them into reusable, configurable product features.
Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams to influence platform architecture and the integrations roadmap.
Reduce bespoke, one-off work by improving internal frameworks, tooling, and standards.
Reliability & Ownership
Write clean, well-tested, and well-documented production code.
Build observability into pipelines and APIs (metrics, logs, alerts).
Troubleshoot and resolve issues across distributed systems and external dependencies.
Analyze and optimize system performance, including resource usage, memory efficiency, and throughput in production environments.
What We’re Looking ForCore Technical Experience
5+ years of experience building production software, including backend services, APIs, or data integrations.
Strong experience building production systems in Python.
Hands-on experience with data pipelines / ETL / data transformations.
Experience designing and operating APIs and backend services in production.
Solid understanding of REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth/API-key authentication, async processing, and background jobs.
Experience integrating with third-party SaaS platforms.
Systems & Product Mindset
Ability to design systems that scale across customers, not one-off deployments.
Comfort working across data modeling, APIs, and integration boundaries.
Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in distributed systems.
Comfortable contributing to shared platform code and internal infrastructure, not just customer-facing components.
Customer-Facing Skills
Experience in customer-facing engineering roles (forward-deployed, applied, solutions, or platform engineering).
Able to communicate technical concepts clearly with both customers and internal teams.
Comfortable balancing near-term delivery with long-term product quality.
Nice to Have
Experience with tools like Salesforce, Pendo, Gong, Segment, Snowflake, or similar ecosystems.
Product engineering experience in big data analytics platforms like Palantir, Quantexa, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.
Background in AI/ML data pipelines or analytics platforms.
Experience helping transform services-heavy workflows into scalable product features.
Applicant Notices & Disclaimers
For information on benefits, equal opportunity employment, and location-specific applicant notices, click here
At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws. This position’s starting pay is: $ 150000.00/Yearly.
