Forward Deployed Engineer, Spice AI
Rust
Open-source data platform for AI context
Open for applications
Open-source data platform for AI context
1-20 employees
Open for applications
1-20 employees
Company mission
To help every developer leverage the latest technology and infrastructure to build the next generation of applications.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Integrating AI and machine learning into applications remains tricky for developers. In spite of remarkable developments in both fields, a general skills gap means they’re not broadly deployed in the design of intelligent software. This looks likely to become a real pain point going forward, as demand for truly intelligent systems is on the rise - which is why Spice AI is developing a platform to help remedy this.
The company's platform consists of an open source decision engine and pooled ‘ML-ready’ data. In short, this allows professional developers to build machine learning and AI into their software. The platform also comes with ready-made ML building blocks available through Spicerack.
Funding for Spice AI comes from impressive players, like senior executives at GitHub and Microsoft Azure, as well as major VC firms like Madrona Venture Group and Founders’ Co-Op. This indicates strong confidence in the company's mission to help the AI software market reach its anticipated multi-billion dollar stature over the years ahead.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Sep 2022
$13.5m
SEED
Oct 2021
$1m
SEED
Total funding: $14.5m
Company HQ
Pioneer Square, Seattle, WA
Leadership
Luke Kim
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously worked as a Tax Accountant at Baines Pendal & Co, alongside consulting with Tidesoft on IT and software engineering. In total has also spent well over a decade in various managerial roles at Microsoft.
Phillip LeBlanc
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Spice AI in 2021, Philip was a Senior Software Engineering Manager at GitHub. Before that, they spent over 8 years at Microsoft in various Software Engineering roles.
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