Lead Software Engineer - (Forward Deployed Engineer)

Eightfold•Santa Clara, CA

8h•$170,000 - $227,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Eightfold is seeking a Lead Engineer to serve as a senior technical leader at the intersection of product engineering, platform architecture, and enterprise customer success. In this role, you will own the most complex and high-impact customer-facing technical challenges across the Eightfold platform. You will design and implement scalable solutions for enterprise customers, lead technical escalations, influence product direction based on real-world customer needs, and mentor engineers across teams. This position involves deep engagement with customer issues, with a focus on engineering durable solutions, improving platform capabilities, and eliminating entire classes of problems, not providing ongoing ticket-based support.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems at scale.
Strong backend engineering experience (e.g., Java, Python, Scala, or similar) with distributed systems.
Proven experience handling enterprise customer escalations and complex production issues.
Deep understanding of system design, APIs, data pipelines, and service-oriented or microservices architectures.
Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments with competing customer and platform priorities.
Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
Hands-on experience building frontend applications with React, Angular, and related UI frameworks
Strong communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Customer Engineering and/or Solutions Engineering, within a SaaS company.
Familiarity with enterprise integrations, data ingestion pipelines, and customer-specific configurations.
Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and production monitoring tools.
Exposure to AI/ML-enabled platforms or data-intensive products.

Responsibilities

Design and build customer-facing enhancements, integrations, and custom workflows that scale across the platform.
Translate enterprise customer requirements into durable, reusable platform capabilities.
Influence product and engineering roadmaps by identifying patterns across customer needs.
Balance short-term customer demands with long-term platform health and architectural integrity.
Own end-to-end design and implementation of complex, cross-cutting features spanning multiple services or product areas.
Drive architectural decisions focused on reliability, performance, extensibility, and maintainability.
Partner closely with Product Management, Platform Engineering, and Applied AI teams to deliver solutions aligned with customer outcomes.
Act as the primary technical escalation point for the most critical enterprise customer issues across all Eightfold products.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues involving distributed systems, large-scale data, and integrations.
Work directly with Customer Success, Solutions Engineering, and Support teams to deliver timely, high-quality resolutions.
Lead root cause analysis and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.
Mentor and guide junior and mid-level engineers, especially within customer engineering and escalation workflows.
Lead design reviews and code reviews with an emphasis on scalability and operational readiness.
Establish best practices for observability, debugging, testing, and incident response in customer-facing systems.