Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Join Alation as a Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, where you will play a crucial role in shaping the adoption of autonomous AI in the world's largest organizations. You will serve as a technical bridge between Alation's strategic enterprise customers and our Product and Engineering teams, architecting and prototyping AI agent systems, embedding with Fortune 500 stakeholders, and building and deploying BI and ML pipelines. This is a senior individual contributor role with visibility and influence across field leadership, Product, and GTM.

About Alation

• Define repeatable, scalable solution patterns that the broader FDE and DS teams can leverage, moving Alation from custom builds toward productized, high-margin delivery.
• Genuine enthusiasm for Alation's mission: you believe trusted data and intelligent governance are foundational to how enterprises win

Responsibilities

• Architect and rapidly prototype AI agent systems, including LLM-based, multi-agent, and agentic workflow designs, that automate complex reasoning tasks and data governance processes within Alation's platform.
• Embed directly with Fortune 500 stakeholders to understand their data ecosystems, governance bottlenecks, and business objectives, then translate those into technical roadmaps grounded in Alation's Knowledge Layer capabilities.
• A prototyper's mindset: you write production-quality code at speed, ship, learn, and iterate, valuing working software over over-engineering
• Proven track record delivering large-scale BI and data pipeline solutions, equally comfortable with SQL and cloud warehousing as with predictive modeling
• A track record of shaping delivery methodology, solution patterns, or technical standards beyond your own engagements, with influence that extends across teams and customer organizations

Requirements

• 12+ years in software engineering, with significant time in customer-facing technical leadership roles such as FDE, Solutions Architect, or CTO-office equivalents
• Architectural fluency across distributed systems, enterprise data governance, metadata management, and compliance-grade data platforms
• Executive presence and high EQ, with the ability to earn trust quickly with Fortune 500 CDOs and technical stakeholders alike
• Deep, hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks including LangChain, AutoGen, and CrewAI, as well as vector databases, RAG architectures, and fine-tuning ML models for enterprise use cases

Pay

USD 152,152 - 275,000