Forward Deployed Engineer
About The Position
As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at LanceDB, part of the Field Engineering organization, you will operate at the intersection of deep systems engineering and direct customer engagement. You will work hands-on with strategic customers in the Bay Area to design, deploy, and scale LanceDB in demanding production environments. This is a highly technical, product-facing role. You will not only deliver customer solutions, but also contribute production-quality code and actionable feedback directly back to LanceDB’s core product lines. Your real-world experience deploying LanceDB alongside modern data infrastructure will directly influence product architecture, APIs, and performance characteristics.
Requirements
- Proven experience building, deploying, or operating distributed, cloud-native databases or data platforms in production.
- Strong proficiency in Rust and Python, with a demonstrated ability to write performant, maintainable systems code.
- Hands-on familiarity with data infrastructure technologies such as Apache Spark, Ray, or similar distributed compute and data processing frameworks.
- Experience integrating databases with batch and streaming data pipelines, ML workflows, or large-scale analytics systems.
- Demonstrated ability to contribute directly to core product codebases, not just customer-specific glue or scripts.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including sharding, replication, consistency, concurrency, and failure handling.
- Strong customer-facing skills, with the ability to work directly with engineers, architects, and technical leaders to drive solutions from concept to production.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with vector databases, similarity search, or multimodal data systems.
- Prior contributions to open-source databases, storage engines, or distributed systems projects.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability tooling.
- Experience with Apache Arrow–based ecosystems, large-scale ML data pipelines, or AI infrastructure stacks.
Responsibilities
- Lead on-site and remote technical deployments of LanceDB with enterprise and strategic customers, including architecture design, benchmarking, performance tuning, and operational hardening.
- Write and maintain production-grade code in Rust and Python for customer integrations, SDK enhancements, ingestion pipelines, and internal tooling.
- Contribute code upstream to LanceDB’s core repositories, including bug fixes, performance improvements, new features, and architectural refinements informed by customer use cases.
- Capture, distill, and communicate structured product feedback from customer engagements to product and core engineering teams, influencing roadmap and design decisions.
- Integrate LanceDB into existing data and AI infrastructure stacks, including Spark, Ray, and similar distributed processing frameworks.
- Diagnose and resolve complex issues involving distributed systems, cloud object storage, concurrency, and large-scale data movement.
- Partner closely with product, core engineering, and GTM teams to ensure customer requirements translate into generalizable, reusable platform capabilities.
- Deliver technical deep dives, workshops, and proofs-of-concept for engineers and architects at customer organizations.
Benefits
- As a Forward Deployed Engineer at LanceDB, you’ll work directly with cutting-edge customers while shaping the core product itself. Your field experience will feed back into LanceDB’s architecture, APIs, and performance roadmap, giving you a rare opportunity to influence both customer success and the evolution of next-generation AI data infrastructure.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
11-50 employees
