Forward Deployed Engineer - AI

Role

Our customers operate in messy, high-stakes data environments, fragmented systems, legacy pipelines, complex compliance requirements, and aggressive timelines. They don't need a demo. They need an engineer who can sit inside their world and make Nexla work for their specific reality.

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer at Nexla, you are that engineer. You'll embed directly with our most strategic customers to understand their data challenges, build solutions on top of the Nexla platform, and get those solutions into production. This is a hands-on, engineering-first role. You'll write code, build integrations, design data flows, and troubleshoot production issues all while developing a deep understanding of each customer's business context. You're not handing off specs. You're shipping outcomes.

The insights you bring back from the field directly shape our product. You'll work closely with the CTO, Product, and core Engineering to surface patterns, identify gaps, and influence what we build next. In many ways, this role operates like the technical co-founder of each customer engagement.

Responsibilities

Build & Deploy at Customer Sites (60%)

• Embedded with strategic customers to understand their data infrastructure, integration requirements, and business goals then architect and implement solutions using the Nexla platform.
• Build production data pipelines, connectors, and workflows tailored to each customer's environment. This includes working across their data warehouses, SaaS apps, streaming systems, and internal APIs.
• Design and deploy AI-powered data flows leveraging Nexla's intelligent connectors, context-aware transformations, and agentic capabilities to solve problems that traditional integration tools can't.
• Own the technical delivery end-to-end. You scope the work, build it, test it, deploy it, and ensure it runs reliably. When something breaks at the customer site, you're the first responder.
• Navigate complex enterprise data environments - messy schemas, undocumented APIs, legacy systems, regulatory constraints. You figure it out and make it work.

Feed the Product (25%)

• Identify repeatable patterns across customer engagements. What you build for one customer should inform what we build into the platform for everyone.
• Surface product gaps, UX friction, and missing capabilities directly to the Product and Engineering teams. You're our best source of ground truth on what customers actually need.
• Contribute back to the Nexla platform build reusable connectors, templates, and reference architectures that accelerate future deployments.
• Write the deployment playbooks, integration guides, and best practices that make the next engagement faster and smoother.

Partner with Go-to-Market (15%)

• Support Sales during high-stakes technical evaluations. Help prospective customers see what's possible by scoping solutions and building proof-of-value demonstrations.
• Act as the trusted technical partner for customer stakeholders from individual data engineers to VPs of Data. You translate between their world and ours.
• Collaborate with Customer Success to ensure long-term adoption and expansion. The deployment doesn't end when the pipeline goes live.

Qualifications
Must-Haves

• 1+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of building and deploying production systems. Former technical founders or engineers with consulting experience are a great fit.
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems in enterprise environments.
• Strong Python skills. You're comfortable building data pipelines, writing integrations, working with APIs, and scripting your way through ambiguous problems.
• Knowledgeable about enterprise data infrastructure data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), streaming platforms (Kafka), ETL/ELT patterns, and the modern data stack.
• Hands-on experience with AI/LLM technologies prompt engineering, agent development, orchestration frameworks, or building AI-powered workflows. You don't need to be an ML researcher, but you should be able to build with these tools.
• Customer-facing confidence. You can run a technical discovery call, whiteboard an architecture with a customer's data team, and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without dumbing things down.
• High agency. You thrive in ambiguous situations where the problem isn't well-defined and the playbook doesn't exist yet. You figure it out, make decisions, and move.
• You've owned outcomes, not just tasks. You've been the person responsible for making something work in a real environment, not just in a staging cluster.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience at a data integration, iPaaS, or ELT company (Fivetran, MuleSoft, Informatica, Airbyte) or in a customer-facing engineering role.
• Familiarity with data protocols and patterns: CDC, GraphQL, gRPC, Webhooks, REST.
• Cloud-native experience (AWS, GCP) including working with managed data services, IAM, networking.
• Comfort with travel (up to 25%) to embed with customer teams when needed.

Why This Might Be Worth It

• You're the tip of the spear. Every engagement you run directly drives revenue and customer expansion. The impact of your work is immediate and visible.
• You shape the product. The patterns you identify in the field become features in the platform. You'll have a direct line to the CTO and Engineering leadership, and your input carries weight.
• AI-native, not AI-adjacent. Nexla is building intelligent, context-aware data integration. You'll be deploying AI capabilities in real customer environments - not running demos of hypothetical use cases.
• Variety and intensity. No two engagements are the same. You'll work across industries, data stacks, and problem spaces. If you get bored doing the same thing for months, this role is designed for you.
• Small team, outsized ownership. You'll be a founding member of this function at Nexla. You won't just fill a role - you'll define how we do forward-deployed engineering.

Location and Compensation
San Mateo, California - Hybrid(with travel)
Compensation for this role will be determined by overall skills, experience, and location. The salary range for a US based Forward Deployed Engineer will be $130,000 to 160,000 USD. The package will also include benefits such as Medical, Dental, and Vision, 401k, and flexible PTO.