Forward Deployed Engineer

Granica•San Francisco, CA

5d•$160,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

Granica builds AI infrastructure for enterprises operating massive data environments. Our platform helps data and engineering teams reduce storage and compute costs, improve performance and reliability, and prepare large datasets for analytics and AI. Granica’s products include: Crunch — continuous optimization for enterprise lakehouse data, Myelin — stateful infrastructure for long-running AI agents, and Large Tabular Models — foundation models designed for enterprise tables. Together, we are building the infrastructure that enables enterprises to own their data, own the intelligence built on it, and scale both efficiently. Granica has demonstrated approximately $200K in annualized value per petabyte and verified customer value within weeks. Granica is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer / Sales Engineer to lead technical engagements with enterprise customers from initial discovery through evaluation and deployment. You will work directly with data platform teams, engineers, architects, and technical executives to understand their environments, identify high-value use cases, design proofs of value, and demonstrate measurable technical and economic impact. This is a hands-on role for someone who can operate across customer engineering, technical sales, product, and engineering.

Requirements

5+ years in Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Forward Deployed Engineering, Data Engineering, or a similar technical customer-facing role
Strong knowledge of modern data platforms, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
Hands-on experience with Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Trino, Presto, or comparable systems
Proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language
Experience leading enterprise technical evaluations, proofs of concept, or deployments
Strong troubleshooting and customer communication skills
High ownership and comfort operating in a fast-moving startup
Ability to travel to customer locations when required

Responsibilities

Lead technical discovery with enterprise data, infrastructure, and AI teams
Understand customer architecture, workloads, constraints, and business priorities
Design and execute proofs of value with clear success criteria
Deploy and configure Granica in complex customer environments
Analyze data-platform performance, reliability, and infrastructure costs
Troubleshoot issues across data, compute, permissions, networking, and integrations
Partner with Account Executives throughout complex enterprise sales cycles
Present technical findings and business value to engineering and executive stakeholders
Translate customer feedback into product and engineering priorities
Build repeatable technical playbooks and evaluation frameworks