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.

 
 
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.