Senior Sustaining and Forward Deployed Engineer

Role Description

The Senior Sustaining & Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for production operations, incident response, and post-launch system reliability across Abacus Insights’ platform. This role blends:

• SRE and production operations
• SWAT-style deep technical problem solving
• Forward-deployed, customer-facing technical work
• Hands-on software development and automation

You will own the most complex, ambiguous, and high-impact production issues, particularly those involving AWS infrastructure, Databricks workloads, and large-scale data pipelines. You will work directly with customers on escalations and deployments, while ensuring learnings are translated back into durable product and platform improvements. This is a hands-on role. You are expected to lead technically during incidents, debug live systems, and write production code where it meaningfully improves reliability and operability.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, sustaining engineering, or production operations
• Deep hands-on experience operating production systems in AWS
• Strong experience troubleshooting Databricks and large-scale data platforms
• Proficiency in Python and experience building production services or tooling
• Strong understanding of distributed systems
• Incident management and RCA practices
• Monitoring, alerting, and observability
• CI/CD Pipelines that leverage Infrastructure as Code
• Proven ability to own problems end-to-end, from detection to permanent resolution
• Excellent communication skills, especially during incidents and customer escalations
• Ability to work backward from customer impact to root cause across systems and codebases, delivering fixes in environments with minimal documentation
• Strong instinct for operational risk, with the ability to proactively identify failure modes and harden systems before they impact customers

Requirements

• Act as a senior technical escalation point during production incidents
• Lead real-time incident triage, mitigation, and recovery efforts
• Drive root cause analysis (RCA) with a focus on systemic, long-term fixes
• Identify recurring failure patterns and push for architectural or operational improvements
• Partner with Customer Success and Engineering to manage customer impact during incidents
• Own post-launch reliability, stability, and operational quality of core systems
• Investigate and resolve complex field issues and production defects
• Ensure fixes developed during incidents or customer escalations are upstreamed into the core product
• Improve operational readiness of services through better runbooks, monitoring, and alerting
• Reduce operational toil by converting repeated manual work into automation
• Engage directly with strategic customers to solve real-world, production-grade technical challenges
• Support complex deployments, integrations, and escalations in customer environments
• Act as a trusted technical partner to customers during high-impact issues
• Translate customer learnings into concrete product, platform, and operational improvements
• Contribute to reusable tools, playbooks, and best practices that accelerate future deployments
• Serve as a subject matter expert for AWS-hosted production systems
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues across AWS compute, storage, networking, IAM, and security
• Debug performance degradation, scalability issues, job failures, and data correctness problems
• Partner with platform and data teams to harden systems for reliability, scale, and operability
• Write production-quality code to automate operational workflows, improve reliability and observability, and eliminate manual intervention
• Review code with a strong emphasis on operability, resiliency, and maintainability
• Provide technical leadership without formal authority, influencing design and operational decisions
• Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and incident leadership
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Customer teams
• Operate effectively in high-pressure, ambiguous environments, especially during customer-impacting incidents

Benefits

• Unlimited paid time off – recharge when you need it
• Work from anywhere – flexibility to fit your life
• Comprehensive health coverage – multiple plan options to choose from
• Equity for every employee – share in our success
• Growth-focused environment – your development matters here
• Home office setup allowance – one-time support to get you started
• Monthly cell phone allowance – stay connected with ease