Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

This is a senior individual contributor role at a fast-growing, Y Combinator-backed open-source AI observability platform - think “Datadog for LLM engineering.” The company sits at the intersection of developer tooling and applied AI, serving a large and rapidly expanding base of engineering teams building production-grade AI agents and applications., * Own 10-20 strategic accounts end-to-end - onboarding, success planning, architecture deep dives, and driving adoption across the full customer lifecycle.

• Guide production readiness - define instrumentation strategies, evaluation setups, data modeling approaches, and security/privacy playbooks for enterprise deployments.
• Act as the voice of the customer internally - synthesise patterns across accounts into concrete product feedback and roadmap input; create a tight signal loop between customer needs and engineering priorities.
• Support self-hosted and on-prem deployments - troubleshoot complex infrastructure configurations, assist with Kubernetes/Docker rollouts, and resolve performance and security issues in customer environments.
• Build scalable enablement assets - integration guides, runbooks, architecture reference patterns, and reusable tooling that reduce time-to-value for new accounts.
• Mentor and lead - help shape the forward-deployment function, mentor junior engineers, and drive technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Travel occasionally to customer sites for key deployments, onboarding sessions, or executive business reviews.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (backend, full-stack, or site reliability), with at least 2 years delivering and operating production systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building or integrating LLM-powered applications in production (prompt engineering, evaluation pipelines, tracing, or model orchestration).
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript (3+ years) with practical experience building SDKs, integrations, or web services.
• Experience with observability and distributed tracing systems (tracing, logging, metrics) and implementing instrumentation for production services.
• Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with analytics or columnar databases; familiarity with ClickHouse or similar engines strongly preferred.
• Experience with containerisation and cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines); able to deploy and troubleshoot self-hosted/on-prem solutions independently.
• Prior customer-facing technical experience - solutions engineering, forward deployment, professional services, or pre-sales - including direct troubleshooting in customer environments.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills; able to present technical concepts clearly to both engineering and business stakeholders.
• Practical knowledge of data privacy, security, and compliance for production LLM deployments (PII handling, retention policies, secure deployments).
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical projects end-to-end with full ownership.
• Legal right to work in the European Union without employer sponsorship - visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to or operating within open-source projects (OSS workflows, issue triage, community collaboration).
• Background at companies working in AI/ML tooling, developer infrastructure, or data observability.

• Salary: €90,000 - €160,000 per year, depending on experience and location.
• Remote-first culture with a small, senior, high-trust team.
• Direct impact on a platform used by thousands of engineering teams globally.