Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: United States

Department: Presales

About the Role

Starburst Forward Deployed Engineers are deeply technical leaders who work directly with enterprise customers and partners to define, design, and operationalize large-scale data platforms built on Starburst. In this role, you will be the primary technical authority guiding customers through architecture, performance engineering, data governance, and multi-cloud implementation patterns.

You will engage with engineering teams, principal architects, and C-suite stakeholders to shape data platform blueprints, troubleshoot complex workloads, and ensure customers successfully operationalize Starburst at scale. As a technical expert, you will dive into integration patterns across the modern analytics stack.

In this highly influential, customer-facing role, you will collaborate with C-suite executives, architects, engineering leaders, and strategic partners to define future-state architectures, drive data platform transformation, and align technical strategy with business outcomes. You will also work closely with Product and Engineering teams to bring field insights back into the organization and help shape Starburst’s long-term roadmap.

This role is located in North America.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Starburst you will: 

• Act as a senior technical advisor to strategic enterprise customers, helping them design and implement modern data architectures and solutions powered by Starburst.

• Build custom solutions, working closely with engineering develop field solutions in customer facing projects.  
  
  
• Engage with executives across IT, data, and business teams, translating Starburst’s value into business impact and aligning platform strategy with organizational goals.
  
  
• Define and articulate target-state architectures, including data products, lakehouse, distributed query engines, and cloud-native data platforms.
  
  
• Develop technical strategy in strategic accounts, partnering with account teams to drive long-term vision, remove obstacles, and ensure successful adoption.
  
  
• Guide customers through architectural reviews, best practices, governance models, performance considerations, and security patterns.
  
  
• Influence and drive product direction, representing customer needs and industry trends to Engineering and Product Management.
  
  
• Develop reference architectures, blueprints, and executive-level technical content that communicates best practices and Starburst’s strategic direction..
  
  
• Evangelize modern data architecture principles, helping customers and partners understand how distributed data access, analytics acceleration, and AI workloads benefit from Starburst.

Some of the things we look for:

• Deep expertise in modern data architectures, including data lakes, lakehouses and data warehouses.
  
  
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid/multi-cloud architecture patterns.
  
  
• Executive presence and exceptional communication skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders across technical and business domains.
  
  
• Demonstrated success guiding large-scale data platform transformations and working with enterprise customers.
  
  
• Hands-on proficiency with SQL, data integration, performance tuning, or analytics engineering.
  
  
• Ability to travel as needed for customer and industry engagements.

• Expertise with kubernetes platforms like EKS,AKS, GKE and Openshift.

Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.