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Salary: USD 148,974 - 201,115 / annual
Alation is seeking a Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as a technical bridge between the company's most strategic enterprise customers and its Product and Engineering teams. This is a senior individual contributor role within the Forward Deployed Engineering organization, positioned at the intersection of customer success, product innovation, and AI-driven data intelligence.
You will 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. You'll 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.
Key responsibilities include building and deploying BI and ML pipelines that convert cataloged data into executive-grade insights, demonstrating measurable ROI tied to Alation deployments. You will partner with Deployment Strategists to connect technical delivery to measurable business outcomes, ensuring every engagement is tied to customer value. You'll define repeatable, scalable solution patterns that the broader FDE and DS teams can leverage, moving Alation from custom builds toward productized, high-margin delivery.
You will 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. You'll design and build internal tooling, including accelerators, automation frameworks, and reusable components, that increase the velocity and consistency of the Forward Deployed Engineering team. Additionally, you will conduct competitive analysis in the field, synthesizing observations across customer environments and surfacing actionable intelligence to Product and GTM teams, and mentor field engineers and customer-side technical teams on best practices for agentic AI, data governance, and Alation platform architecture.
Alation is a data intelligence platform company valued at over $1.7 billion with more than $340M in funding and 650+ customers, including 40% of the Fortune 100. The company is pioneering AI agents and trusted data to drive self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI innovation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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
- Experience with 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
- Ability to write production-quality code at speed, ship, learn, and iterate
- Track record of shaping delivery methodology, solution patterns, or technical standards beyond your own engagements
- Executive presence and high EQ, with ability to earn trust quickly with Fortune 500 CDOs and technical stakeholders
- Genuine enthusiasm for Alation's mission around trusted data and intelligent governance
