Forward Deploying Engineer

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Forward Deploying Engineer

Location Remote, North America

Employment Type Full-time or contract

Location Type Remote

Department Engineering

Compensation United States: US$135,000–US$175,000 / year Canada: CA$95,000–CA$125,000 / year

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Overview Application

About Aeolus

Aeolus Data Solutions is a boutique, founder-led data engineering practice for startups and scale-ups across North America. We design, build, and audit the production data pipelines and AI-ready data foundations that analytics and AI initiatives actually run on. Our thesis is simple: AI projects don’t fail on the model — they fail on the data pipeline underneath it.

We bring Big Tech engineering discipline (CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and versioned pipelines) to companies too lean to hire it in-house, and a senior practitioner works directly with every client. No account managers. No junior delivery bench. No handoffs.

The role

As a Forward Deploying Engineer at Aeolus, you sit directly at the intersection of production software engineering, data systems, and client delivery. You embed with client engineering, data, and product teams to design, integrate, and deploy custom data and AI solutions straight into their production environments.

You won’t be working from rigid specs or waiting on ticket queues. You’ll dive into unfamiliar architectures in week one, diagnose pipeline bottlenecks and integration friction, prototype practical solutions rapidly, and harden them into maintainable, production-grade systems with automated tests and CI/CD. You own technical delivery and the client relationship end to end.

What you’ll do

• Embed directly with client teams. Partner with client CTOs, engineering leads, and product teams to solve their most critical data integration, platform, and AI-readiness challenges.
• Deploy and productionize custom data & AI pipelines. Build high-throughput ingestion pipelines, streaming/batch workflows, reverse-ETL syncs, and API integrations that connect client application stacks to modern warehouses, lakehouses, and LLM endpoints.
• Bridge software engineering and data platforms. Write clean, production-grade Python, TypeScript, and SQL; build robust data contracts; and ensure end-to-end reliability from backend services to analytical and AI layers.
• Prototype fast, harden rigorously. Move quickly from scoping and architecture discovery to functional proof-of-concept, then apply Big Tech engineering rigor (CI/CD, comprehensive testing, Terraform, Docker) to turn prototypes into reliable production infrastructure.
• Own the technical client relationship. Lead technical kickoffs, architect solutions live on calls, solve edge cases across diverse client clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure), and guide client teams through production handoff.

What we’re looking for

• 4+ years building and shipping production software and data systems. You’ve owned systems in production where reliability, latency, and correctness mattered.
• Polyglot engineering skills: Strong Python and SQL fundamentals, paired with experience in modern application languages (e.g., TypeScript or Go) and database systems (PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery).
• Experience with modern data tooling & infrastructure: Orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect), transformation (dbt), cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Docker, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Fast ramp-up on unfamiliar codebases. You find your footing quickly in messy, legacy, or partially documented systems and deliver working solutions with minimal ramp-up time.
• Client-facing communication & technical empathy. You can explain complex tradeoffs to engineers and founders alike, write crisp technical documentation, and operate as a trusted technical partner.
• High ownership and self-direction. Flat organization, high trust, no micromanagement — you take problems from vague requirements to deployed solutions.

Nice to have

• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Lead, or in technical consulting / agency environments.
• Hands-on experience building production RAG / LLM pipelines (vector databases, semantic retrieval, chunking strategies, evaluation loops).
• Experience with real-time or event-driven streaming architectures (Kafka, Redpanda, Kinesis).
• Experience with data observability, data contracts, or FinOps / warehouse cost optimization.
• Active contributions to open-source data or developer tooling projects.

How we work

• Remote-first, async-friendly, working across North American time zones.
• Direct founder collaboration — flat, fast, no bureaucracy.
• Variety by design — multiple stacks, industries, and real-world architectures; greenfield builds and complex rescue missions.
• Senior-only shop — your name is on the work, and the quality bar is the whole product.

Compensation & logistics

• Employment type: Full-time, or contract if that suits you better.
• Location / work authorization: Remote within Canada or the United States; you must be authorized to work where you’re based. We’re incorporated in both British Columbia and California.
• Compensation:
• United States: US$135,000–US$175,000 / year
• Canada: CA$95,000–CA$125,000 / year
• Start: Flexible — we move at the pace of finding the right person.
  

Sound like you?

[email protected]

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