Forward Deployed Engineer (Rust)

Spice AI • Bay Area, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Building data-driven AI applications and agents is too complex, even for advanced developers. This new generation of applications need fast, secure access to data across disparate systems, the ability to search and reason over that data, and infrastructure that’s reliable enough to run in production. Today, teams often need to piece together query engines, search systems, caches, and AI tooling, adding significant complexity along the way. At Spice AI, we simplify this by unifying query federation, search, and AI into a single runtime for building intelligent applications. Our mission is to make building AI-powered software as easy building a modern web application and help developers build the next generation of applications. We offer both open source and fully managed cloud deployments. This role requires a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with customers and partners, accelerating adoption through direct engineering contributions. Responsibilities include deploying, optimizing, and extending Spice.ai solutions in production environments, while collaborating on product improvements. If open source, distributed systems, and real-world search & AI deployment drive you, apply. Spice AI was founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, creating technology to help developers build intelligent applications and agents that learn and adapt. Before co-founding Spice AI, Luke was the co-creator of Azure Incubations in the Office of the Azure CTO, where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies including Dapr and OAM. Spice AI is backed by some of the top industry angel investors and leaders, including Nat Friedman, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who is also on the board. Spice AI also has notable VC backing from Madrona Venture Group, Basis Set Ventures, Founders' Co-op, and Picus Capital.

Requirements

• 5+ years in engineering roles, with focus on deploying data, search, and AI systems in enterprise environments.
• Experience designing, implementing, and scaling production database engines, distributed systems, search engines, and data & AI pipelines.
• Track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions in customer-facing contexts.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to ramp up quickly and deliver impact.
• Experience with Apache infrastructure, CNCF stack, or cloud-native development.
• Deep knowledge of databases, data warehousing, data lakes, search, virtualization, and mesh principles.
• Proficiency with Databricks, Snowflake, Starburst, Dremio, ElasticSearch, or similar.
• Strong SQL skills in queries, syntax, modeling, and optimizations.
• Familiarity with data storage like HDFS, Amazon S3, and relational databases.
• Skills in data integration, including ETL/ELT, ingestion, and transformation.
• Ability to tune performance and optimize systems.
• Knowledge of data security, privacy, authentication, authorization, and encryption.
• Problem-solving for complex data challenges.
• Presentation skills for technical and executive audiences.
• Ability to explain concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Relationship-building with customers and partners.
• Willingness to travel 20%+ based on customer needs.

Nice To Haves

• Contributions to open-source projects preferred.

Responsibilities

• Embed with enterprise customers and partners to deploy Spice.ai OSS/Enterprise and Cloud Platform in production.
• Build, configure, and optimize proof-of-concepts and deployments for performance, scalability, and security.
• Collaborate with engineering to incorporate customer feedback into core product features.
• Resolve technical blockers, debug issues, and extend Spice.ai capabilities on-site or remotely.
• Design end-to-end architectures using Spice.ai for data querying, search, and AI inference.
• Identify expansion opportunities and drive adoption of new features.
• Work side-by-side with founders as a leader in customer success engineering.
• Contribute to Spice.ai OSS improvements based on real-world usage.
• Own initiatives to refine offerings and deliver superior developer experiences.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees