Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Alation
$200-275k
OTE
$152.2-205.4k
BASE
75/25 split
Enterprise data intelligence solutions
Be an early applicant
Enterprise data intelligence solutions
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-275k
OTE
$152.2-205.4k
BASE
75/25 split
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To help businesses and institutions to get better value from their data, improving outreach and profit by combining human potential with modern data intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
While companies continue to gather huge volumes of data on customer behavior, efforts in leveraging said data are often hindered by data access and interpretation, which ultimately leads to incomplete datasets.
Alation is a machine learning powered data catalog. It pulls together all a company’s key data from popular sources like Oracle, Spark and Tableau, and presents it on its platform. This means that users can search for multiple strands of data on just one API. Its services include data governance, digital transformation, and data discovery.
With both the data catalog and data analytics market growing rapidly at a 25% annual growth rate, Alation finds itself in a very strong position having shown triple digit growth for four years running. The platform is used for diverse purposes by Pfizer, FinnAir, Pepsico, Salesforce, American Express and BMW.
It’s this range of applicability, from weather-induced flight delay prediction to rare disease identification, that has led to investments resulting in a valuation of $1.7B. Though it's not the only company of its ilk on the market, with the likes of Informatica, Aginity and Alteryx all competing, Alation’s rapid year-on-year growth, solid investment from the likes of Japanese data communications leader NTT DOCOMO and an elite customer base bodes well for the company's future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
4% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Nov 2022
$123m
SERIES E
Jun 2021
$110m
SERIES D
Total funding: $315m
Company benefits
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Life insurance
- Short-term disability
- Paid time off
- Paid holidays
- Personal sick days
- Parental leave
- Competitive Pay
- Company equity
- Performance bonus
- Flexible work hours
- Remote work opportunities
- Commuter benefits program
- 401(k)
Company HQ
Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Satyen Sangani
(Co-Founder & CEO)Having studied at Columbia, they worked at Morgan Stanley, Texas Pacific Group, and Andale, before an MSc at Oxford. They then worked as a VP at Oracle for over 9 years prior to co-founding Alation in July 2012.
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