Forward Deployed Engineer

What You'll Be Doing
We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical force behind how customers evaluate, adopt, and succeed with Xata. You'll partner with our Head of GTM across the deal cycle and then keep going past the handshake: leading technical discovery, designing proof-of-value engagements, and guiding teams through real migrations onto Xata.

This is a hybrid pre-sales and technical delivery role, and it is hands-on by design. You'll run the discovery, build the demo, write the migration tooling, and debug the production edge case with the customer. As our first dedicated FDE, you won't inherit a playbook; you'll write it: defining how we engage technically, what "good" looks like, and the tooling and patterns the next FDEs will run on.

In this role, you will
Lead technical discovery with developers, platform teams, and AI-native companies. Get to the root of what they're actually trying to build, not just the feature they asked about.

Design and run proof-of-value engagements that prove Xata against the customer's real data and real constraints, then own them to a clear technical outcome.

Guide and execute database migrations onto Xata, using our open-source tooling (pgroll, pgstream) and building whatever is missing to make the path smooth.

Build the assets that make us credible: demo environments, reference architectures, migration scripts, and integration patterns for branching, replication, and lifecycle management.

Be the technical voice in the deal cycle. Partner closely with GTM, handle the hard technical objections, and earn trust with the engineers in the room.

Embed with customers and write code with them. Outcomes over artifacts: a working integration beats a polished slide every time.

Close the loop with Product and Engineering. You'll see what's breaking and what's missing before anyone else, and you'll turn that field signal into a sharp, prioritized stream of feedback to our Data Plane, Control Plane, and Frontend teams.

Set the technical bar and build the function: the playbooks, demo infrastructure, and engagement model that the FDE team will scale on as we grow.

About You
You are a strong, hands-on engineer who is genuinely energized by being in front of customers. Both halves matter.

You are a generalist problem-solver. Full-stack, data plumbing, scripting, debugging, infrastructure: you reach for whatever the problem needs and figure out the rest fast.

You are deeply credible with engineers and comfortable in the weeds of databases, SQL, APIs, distributed systems, and developer workflows.

You thrive in ambiguity and high ownership. You walk into an unclear, high-stakes situation, find the real problem, and drive it from idea to something shipped and adopted.

You have a bias to build. When something is missing, you make it, rather than filing a request and waiting.

You communicate clearly in writing and work effectively in a remote, async environment.

You're comfortable being the first and only person in this seat, building the function and not inheriting it.

Nice to Have
Experience as a forward deployed, solutions, or sales engineer, or a consulting background with real delivery ownership.

Experience with AI agents, agentic workflows, or AI-native developer tooling.

Deep familiarity with PostgreSQL, database migrations, replication, or PostgreSQL-adjacent products.

Background in open-source products or communities.

Experience with both product-led, self-serve motions and sales-assisted ones.