Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Alation•USA-California, CA

4d•$148,974 - $201,115

About The Position

As a Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be at the sharpest edge of Alation's mission. This is a get-in-the-trenches-and-build role for a seasoned technical leader who can turn ambiguous enterprise problems into production-grade, AI-driven solutions, often in days rather than quarters. You will serve as a primary technical bridge between Alation's most strategic enterprise customers and our Product and Engineering teams. Recognized internally and externally as a subject matter expert in agentic AI, data governance, and enterprise architecture, you will shape how the world's largest organizations adopt autonomous AI, and actively influence how Alation's platform and delivery methodology evolve to support it. This is a senior individual contributor role within the Forward Deployed Engineering organization, with visibility and influence across field leadership, Product, and GTM.

Requirements

12+ years in software engineering, with significant time in customer-facing technical leadership roles such as FDE, Solutions Architect, or CTO-office equivalents.
Deep, hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks including LangChain, AutoGen, and CrewAI, as well as vector databases, RAG architectures, and fine-tuning ML models for enterprise use cases.
Proven track record delivering large-scale BI and data pipeline solutions, equally comfortable with SQL and cloud warehousing as with predictive modeling.
Architectural fluency across distributed systems, enterprise data governance, metadata management, and compliance-grade data platforms.
A prototyper's mindset: you write production-quality code at speed, ship, learn, and iterate, valuing working software over over-engineering.
A track record of shaping delivery methodology, solution patterns, or technical standards beyond your own engagements, with influence that extends across teams and customer organizations.
Executive presence and high EQ, with the ability to earn trust quickly with Fortune 500 CDOs and technical stakeholders alike.
Genuine enthusiasm for Alation's mission: you believe trusted data and intelligent governance are foundational to how enterprises win.

Responsibilities

Architect and rapidly prototype AI agent systems, including LLM-based, multi-agent, and agentic workflow designs, that automate complex reasoning tasks and data governance processes within Alation's platform.
Embed directly with Fortune 500 stakeholders to understand their data ecosystems, governance bottlenecks, and business objectives, then translate those into technical roadmaps grounded in Alation's Knowledge Layer capabilities.
Build and deploy BI and ML pipelines that convert cataloged data into executive-grade insights, demonstrating measurable ROI tied to Alation deployments.
Partner with Deployment Strategists to connect technical delivery to measurable business outcomes, ensuring every engagement is tied to customer value, not configuration milestones.
Define repeatable, scalable solution patterns that the broader FDE and DS teams can leverage, moving Alation from custom builds toward productized, high-margin delivery.
Act as a force multiplier for Product and Engineering by feeding real-world edge cases, customer patterns, and AI use cases back into the core platform roadmap.
Design and build internal tooling, including accelerators, automation frameworks, and reusable components, that increase the velocity and consistency of the Forward Deployed Engineering team.
Conduct competitive analysis in the field, synthesizing observations across customer environments and surfacing actionable intelligence to Product and GTM teams.
Mentor field engineers and customer-side technical teams on best practices for agentic AI, data governance, and Alation platform architecture.