{"id":1984963,"url":"https://alion.io/job/nextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering","title":"Head of Forward Deployed Engineering","company":{"id":680653,"name":"Nextdata","domain":"nextdata.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/next-data","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-06T23:45:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T01:43:34Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":32,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":32},"description":"The Company\nThe future of data-especially for agentic/LLM consumption-lies in decentralization, and autonomous data products are the proven approach for implementing it at enterprise scale. Nextdata OS is an autonomous data product operating system built to meet the challenge of safely decentralizing data at scale for humans and agents.\nWe envision a world where AI systems can safely and reliably act on data because the context of the business travels with the data itself. In this world, domain teams own the meaning, quality, and policies of their data, while the enterprise maintains interoperability and trust across organizational and technological boundaries.\nOur purpose is to transform how organizations create, share, discover, and use data-so that data becomes a trusted, governed product that both people and AI systems can use directly. By turning fragmented datasets into autonomous data products, we enable organizations to move from brittle pipelines and manual coordination to governed, machine-usable data at scale.\nNextdata OS makes data products first-class primitives of the data architecture. Autonomous data products carry their own semantics, policies, quality signals, and delivery interfaces, exposing domain-centric context that applications, analytics, and AI agents can safely consume. A shared control plane ensures that while domains operate independently, semantics, governance, and interoperability remain coherent across the enterprise.\nThe world of enterprise data is inherently complex. Data lives across platforms, organizations, and trust boundaries. It is constantly evolving, used in many different modes, and increasingly consumed by machines rather than humans. Traditional approaches-centralizing data, enforcing governance through process, and managing meaning through documentation-struggle to keep pace with this reality.\nOur mission is to make data capable of governing and describing itself, so that both humans and AI can discover, trust, and use it correctly. By embedding semantics, policies, and context directly into autonomous data products, we help organizations transform fragmented data estates into reliable foundations for analytics, applications, and AI.\nAbout The Role\nAs Nextdata's founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you are our senior technical leader in the field. You take Nextdata OS from first proof of concept to production inside some of the world's largest data organizations. You design the solution, run the delivery, and lead the team that builds it: Nextdata engineers alongside contractors and system integrator partners, up to around ten people on a single account.\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role, not an account management role. Our sales team owns the commercial relationship; you own making the customer successful, and you'll build the forward deployed function that every future deployment runs on.\nThe Impact You Will Have\nArchitect the solution. Turn a customer's business problem into a concrete design on Nextdata OS: the autonomous data products, how they integrate with the customer's existing platforms, and the analytics, applications, and AI agents built on top.\n\nRun the deployment. Own delivery end to end: define success criteria with the customer, plan and sequence the work, unblock the team, and get to production.\n\nLead the team on the account. Direct and mentor the forward deployed engineers, contractors, and SI partners working with each customer, up to ten people per account.\n\nStay hands-on. Write code, debug in customer environments, and build the first version yourself when that's the fastest path.\n\nShape what we sell. Join technical discovery and PoC scoping with sales so that what we commit to is what we can deliver, and help write scopes of work.\n\nFeed the roadmap. Bring what you learn in the field back to product and engineering, and partner with them on features and gaps.\n\nBuild the playbook. Define how Nextdata does forward deployed engineering: the methods, tooling, and hiring bar that future deployments will follow.\n\nYou Are The Right Fit If You Have\n8+ years in technical, customer-facing engineering (forward deployed engineering, deployment strategy, solution architecture, or technical consulting), taking data platforms to production in large enterprises.\n\nA track record of leading delivery teams of 5-10+ people, including contractors or SI partners, on complex customer deployments.\n\nStrong hands-on engineering skills: Python and SQL, modern data platforms (such as Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, or dbt), and cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP.\n\nSolution architecture judgment: you can design for a customer's messy reality and explain the trade-offs to engineers and executives alike.\n\nProject management discipline: you turn ambiguous goals into plans, milestones, and shipped outcomes.\n\nComfort working with stakeholders from individual engineers to Chief Data Officers.\n\nWillingness to travel up to 25%, more during peak times.\n\nNice To Have\nForward deployed experience at Palantir or a similar company.\n\nExperience deploying an early-stage product that's still evolving.\n\nFamiliarity with data mesh, data products, semantic layers, or Kubernetes.\n\nExperience building AI or LLM applications on enterprise data.\n\nOur Benefits\nWe are an early-stage company, but we don't subsist on ramen! We are an experienced team with families. We provide $2,000 for your home workspace setup, company laptop, premium health, vision, and dental insurance coverage for you and your family. As an early-stage start-up, you will receive a compensation package that includes a competitive salary and equity i","description_format":"text","description_chars":5663,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Dental insurance","Equity","Insurance coverage"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents","Data Engineering & Migration Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-07T01:53:29Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":38,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.688,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":31,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/nextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/nextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T04:28:53Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":9678,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":680653},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=680653"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/nextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnextdata-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1984963}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"nextdata.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1984963},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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