Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Job

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical front line of our enterprise deals in EMEA.

This is not a quota-carrying sales role, and it is not a pure delivery role. You are the person who walks into a room with a customer's data architects, understands their environment faster than they expect you to, and shows them what becomes possible when their agents can actually reason over their data. Then you make it real. You run the proof of value, you convert it into a production proof of concept, and you carry everything you learned back to our engineering team so the product gets better.

You'll be one of the first people a customer meets and one of the last to leave before they're in production. That means the demo, the technical objection, the competitive comparison against our competitors, the architecture whiteboard with a skeptical principal engineer, and the honest read on whether a deal is real. All of it is yours.

We're a small team, so you'll help build the playbook rather than inherit one. This role requires regular travel to customer sites across the UK and Europe.

What You Will Be Doing

• Run technical demos and discovery sessions with enterprise buyers, from data platform leads up to CIOs
• Build and own our pre-sales playbook: demo narratives, discovery frameworks, objection handling, and reference architectures
• Own the competitive landscape. Know where we win against Palantir, the hyperscalers, and the semantic layer vendors, and know honestly where we don't
• Drive proofs of value from scoping through to signed proof of concept, holding the technical thread the whole way
• Translate customer environments and edge cases into structured product feedback that reaches engineering with enough context to act on
• Partner with our ML and infrastructure engineers on deployments, so what you promised in the room is what gets built
• Act as the technical voice of the customer internally, and the credible technical voice of zaimler externally

Prior Experience

• 5+ years total experience, including 2 to 3 years in a hands-on technical or data role before moving into a customer-facing one. You've built something, not just presented about it
• Enterprise B2B software background; you understand long cycles, procurement, security review, and multi-stakeholder buying
• Track record converting technical proofs of value into production commitments
• Real fluency in the modern data stack: warehouses, pipelines, and how enterprises actually store and govern data
• Working knowledge of how LLM and agentic systems are deployed in production, and honest judgment about what they can and can't do today
• The credibility to hold a room of senior engineers. You can be challenged on architecture and push back without losing them
• Strong read on room dynamics: who holds budget, who holds veto, and who becomes your champion
• Comfortable with ambiguity, and with being the only zaimler person on site

Nice to Haves

• You've done this at a field-heavy data or AI company
• Experience with knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, or entity resolution
• Deployments into regulated or air-gapped environments (financial services, insurance, telco, public sector)
• Enough Python or SQL to prototype in front of a customer rather than promising to follow up
• Prior startup or zero-to-one experience where you helped define the motion, not just execute it
• Multilingual, or experience selling across multiple European markets

Why Join zaimler

• You'd be early. Real enterprise deployments already running, no pre-sales org to slot into, no playbook to inherit. How zaimler runs a technical evaluation in EMEA will mostly be how you decide to do it.
• The problem is genuinely unsolved. Most of enterprise AI right now is a wrapper. We're building the layer underneath. You'll be explaining something hard to people who will know if you're bluffing.
• You're building the region, not joining it. You'll be first on the ground in Europe, and the field motion you establish is the one the team we hire after you will inherit.
• Close to the people building it. What you hear in the room goes straight to a founding team still writing the roadmap, not into a request queue.
• Small enough that you move the number. You'll be able to point at specific accounts and know they went our way because of you.