Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is the technical front line for enterprise deals across EMEA, sitting between product and sales at an early-stage AI infrastructure company. You will own the full arc from first customer conversation through production deployment, building the pre-sales playbook that the team after you inherits. It is a field-heavy role where your credibility with senior engineers and architects directly shapes how the company moves in Europe.

What You'll Do

• Walk into customer environments, rapidly understand their data architecture and constraints, and demonstrate what becomes possible with agentic reasoning over their data.
• Run proofs of value end-to-end: scoping, technical validation, competitive positioning, and conversion into production commitments.
• Own the demo, handle technical objections, compare honestly against major competitors and hyperscalers, and hold the architecture whiteboard with skeptical principal engineers.
• Run discovery sessions and technical deep-dives with data platform leads, infrastructure teams, and CIOs across the UK and Europe.
• Build and own the pre-sales playbook: demo narratives, discovery frameworks, objection handling, and reference architectures.
• Translate edge cases and customer constraints into structured product feedback that reaches engineering with enough context to act on.
• Partner with internal ML and infrastructure teams on deployments, ensuring what you promised in the room is what gets built.
• Act as the technical voice of the customer internally and the credible external voice of the company on site.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years of total professional experience, including 2 to 3 years in a hands-on technical or data role building systems, not just presenting about them.
• Demonstrated track record converting technical proofs of value into production commitments in enterprise B2B software deals.
• Deep working knowledge of the modern data stack: warehouses, ETL/ELT pipelines, data governance, and how enterprises architect and operate these systems.
• Working knowledge of LLM and agentic systems deployed in production, including a realistic assessment of current capabilities and limitations.
• Experience running technical discovery and demos with enterprise stakeholders (data architects, platform leads, CIOs) and handling complex technical objections.
• Ability to navigate enterprise procurement, security reviews, and multi-stakeholder buying processes.
• Comfortable being the sole company representative on site and operating with a high degree of ambiguity.
• Experience at a field-heavy data or AI infrastructure company, or prior startup experience helping define go-to-market motion from scratch.
• Knowledge of knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, or entity resolution is a strong plus.
• Experience deploying into regulated or air-gapped environments (financial services, insurance, telco, or public sector) is valuable.
• Enough Python or SQL to prototype in front of a customer rather than promising to follow up.
• Multilingual ability or experience selling across multiple European markets is a plus.
• Willingness and ability to travel regularly to customer sites across the UK and Europe.
• Location
• Hybrid, based in New York, NY. The role requires regular travel to customer sites across the UK and Europe. Visa sponsorship is not available.