Forward Deployed Engineer (Rust)

Job Description

Job Description

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.

For a deeper dive into the vision, watch Founder and CEO Luke Kim's CMU Databases talk on Spice.ai OSS at -ec1lKfU and read his Materialized View interview at -a-cdn-for-databases-spice-ai.

At Spice AI, we hire for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. We're looking for exceptional, ambitious builders who are driven to solve hard problems and push the boundaries of what's possible for AI.

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.

Who We Are Looking For

• An exceptional engineer.
• A problem solver who starts with customer problems and solves them with technology.
• A thinker who challenges the status quo, rejects the current world model, and builds better for everyone.
• A positive force who asks what's possible instead of focusing on limitations.
• Someone who views work as meaningful, not just a job.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, leading by creating clarity.
• Passionate about high performance with high standards.

What We're Looking For

• 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.
• Contributions to open-source projects preferred.
• 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.

In This Role, You'll

• 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.

Your First 90 Days

• First week: Deploy a Spice.ai instance for a customer scenario and fix a deployment issue.
• First month: Ramp up, lead a POC deployment, and contribute optimizations to Spice.ai OSS.
• 30-60 days: Take ownership of a customer deployment area, from architecture to production rollout.
• 60-90 days: Propose and execute a technical strategy for scaling customer integrations.

About Spice AI

Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates 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.

Learn more:

- On TechCrunch and GeekWire

- About the team at spice.ai/careers

- The Spice.ai general availability announcement blog post

- The Spice.ai OSS project announcement blog post

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.