Forward Deployed Engineer Job at LanceDB (San Francisco)

Job Description

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at LanceDB, part of the Engineering organization, you will operate at the intersection of deep systems engineering and direct customer engagement. You will work hands-on with strategic customers in the Bay Area to design, deploy, and scale LanceDB in demanding production environments. This is a highly technical, product-facing role. You will not only deliver customer solutions, but also contribute production-quality code and actionable feedback directly back to LanceDB’s core product lines. Your real-world experience deploying LanceDB alongside modern data infrastructure will directly influence product architecture, APIs, and performance characteristics.

Job Responsibility

Lead on-site and remote technical deployments of LanceDB with enterprise and strategic customers, including architecture design, benchmarking, performance tuning, and operational hardening
Write and maintain production-grade code in Rust and Python for customer integrations, SDK enhancements, ingestion pipelines, and internal tooling
Contribute code upstream to LanceDB’s core repositories, including bug fixes, performance improvements, new features, and architectural refinements informed by customer use cases
Capture, distill, and communicate structured product feedback from customer engagements to product and core engineering teams, influencing roadmap and design decisions
Integrate LanceDB into existing data and AI infrastructure stacks, including Spark, Ray, and similar distributed processing frameworks
Diagnose and resolve complex issues involving distributed systems, cloud object storage, concurrency, and large-scale data movement
Partner closely with product, core engineering, and GTM teams to ensure customer requirements translate into generalizable, reusable platform capabilities
Deliver technical deep dives, workshops, and proofs-of-concept for engineers and architects at customer organizations

Requirements

At least 2 years of experience in a technical field or forward deployed engineering role
Ability and willingness to be on-site at customers daily
Proven experience building, deploying, or operating distributed, cloud-native databases or data platforms in production
Strong proficiency in Rust and Python, with a demonstrated ability to write performant, maintainable systems code
Hands-on familiarity with data infrastructure technologies such as Apache Spark, Ray, or similar distributed compute and data processing frameworks
Experience integrating databases with batch and streaming data pipelines, ML workflows, or large-scale analytics systems
Demonstrated ability to contribute directly to core product codebases, not just customer-specific glue or scripts
Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including sharding, replication, consistency, concurrency, and failure handling
Strong customer-facing skills, with the ability to work directly with engineers, architects, and technical leaders to drive solutions from concept to production

Nice to have

Experience with vector databases, similarity search, or multimodal data systems
Prior contributions to open-source databases, storage engines, or distributed systems projects
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability tooling
Experience with Apache Arrow–based ecosystems, large-scale ML data pipelines, or AI infrastructure stacks

What we offer

Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
401(k) retirement plan
Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA)
Commuter benefits
Generous paid time off
Offers Equity
Offers Commission

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Forward Deployed Engineer

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