Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

Xata is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical force behind customer evaluation, adoption, and success with Xata. This is a hybrid pre-sales and technical delivery role.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with developers, platform teams, and AI-native companies.
• Design and run proof-of-value engagements that prove Xata against customer data and constraints.
• Guide and execute database migrations onto Xata, using open-source tooling (pgroll, pgstream) and building missing components.
• Build demo environments, reference architectures, migration scripts, and integration patterns for branching, replication, and lifecycle management.
• Act as the technical voice in the deal cycle, partnering with GTM and handling technical objections.
• Embed with customers and write code to achieve working integrations.
• Provide feedback to Product and Engineering on field signals to improve Data Plane, Control Plane, and Frontend teams.
• Set the technical bar and build the FDE function, including playbooks, demo infrastructure, and engagement models.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Hands-on engineering skills.
• Generalist problem-solving ability across full-stack, data plumbing, scripting, debugging, and infrastructure.
• Credibility with engineers and comfort with databases, SQL, APIs, distributed systems, and developer workflows.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity with high ownership.
• Bias to build and create missing components.
• Clear written communication and effectiveness in a remote, async environment.
• Comfort being the first and only person in this role, building the function.

Nice to Have

• Experience as a forward deployed, solutions, or sales engineer, or a consulting background with 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 product-led, self-serve motions and sales-assisted ones.

Working at Xata

• Stable company with $35M raised and years of runway.
• Remote-first team with experience building distributed teams.
• Asynchronous work culture with minimal meetings.
• Significant autonomy, ownership, and opportunity to shape product and company.
• Open source at its core.
• Small team with large impact.
• Opportunity to shape the future of Postgres infrastructure.
• Female-founded with an all-female board of directors.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity.
• Competitive salary and compensation.
• A seat at the table to shape customer engagement.
• 30 vacation days, plus local public holidays.
• Comprehensive health insurance.
• Remote-first, async-first work environment.
• Budget for a co-working space.
• Learning budget for conferences, courses, and books.
• Two company off-sites per year.