Team : Engineering / Customer Solutions

Stage : Early, high-impact role

Why this role exists :

Forward Deployment Engineers are Walt's strategic weapon for enterprise success.

Walt is an agentic data engineering and analytics platform. Our customers don't just "install software" - they reshape how data is modeled, queried, and reasoned over. FDEs sit at the center of that transformation.

This role blends solutions architecture, product thinking, and hands-on engineering. You work directly with customers to scope problems, build real solutions, and take them all the way to production. One hour you might be debugging SQL; the next you're whiteboarding data architecture with a VP; later you're feeding insights back into the product roadmap.

If you like owning outcomes end-to-end and operating close to real customer problems, this role is for you.

What you'll do :

Own customer deployments, end-to-end :

- Frame ambiguous problems and turn them into concrete technical plans

- Lead PoCs - production rollouts - monitoring and iteration

- Be accountable for outcomes, not just deliverables

Translate business goals into technical reality :

- Work with customer stakeholders to understand analytics and data-engineering needs

- Convert loosely defined goals into clear schemas, metrics, and guardrails

Build and optimize customer-specific implementations :

- Design semantic models and data mappings across diverse schemas

- Debug and optimize SQL, APIs, and pipelines in real production environments

- Ensure accuracy, performance, and maintainability

Partner with sales and product :

- Support pre-sales by scoping solutions and demonstrating real value

- Identify recurring patterns, gaps, and edge cases

- Drive product requirements, PRDs, and roadmap inputs grounded in real usage

Enable customers :

- Train customer teams on Walt best practices and advanced features

- Help customers become self-sufficient while remaining a trusted technical partner

What we're looking for :

Strong engineering foundation :

- 3+ years shipping and operating production software

- Strong Python and SQL; comfortable with APIs and services

- You can debug real systems, not just write demos

Modern data stack experience :

- Hands-on with Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar

- dbt experience strongly preferred

- Comfortable reasoning about schemas, metrics, lineage, and data quality

Exceptional communication :

- Can explain complex technical ideas clearly to both executives and engineers

- Comfortable leading technical conversations with customers

High ambiguity tolerance :

- You thrive when requirements are unclear

- You define the path forward instead of waiting for instructions

Customer empathy :

- Genuinely curious about customer problems

- You care about whether the solution actually works, not just whether it shipped

What makes this role different :

- You're not a support engineer or a post-sales afterthought

- You help shape the product, not just deploy it

- You operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer impact

- Your work directly influences revenue, retention, and roadmap decisions

Why Walt :

- Early-stage company with real customers and real problems

- Founding team with deep experience in large-scale data systems

- Small team, high ownership, and zero politics

- We value intellectual honesty, directness, and people who care deeply about building something great