Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

WHO WE ARE:

Materialize is the live context layer for AI agents and applications. Materialize lets engineering teams use SQL to transform siloed operational data into up-to-the-second, trustworthy views into any element of their business — delivering fresh context to AI agents, interactive search pipelines, and enabling low-latency, event-driven architectures for microservices and core business processes. Materialize is trusted by Notion, Bilt Rewards, and Crane Worldwide Logistics to solve their most pressing operational data challenges while building a live data foundation for their AI transformation.

Our team spans the US (NYC headquarters), Canada, and EMEA.

INVESTORS:

Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As Materialize's first Forward Deployed Engineer, you embed with a small number of our most strategic customers and help them build end-to-end solutions with Materialize at the core. You'll join our Go-To-Market organization, partnering with Account Executives and Field Engineering to take engineering-led organizations, customers like Notion, General Mills, Bilt Rewards, and Crane Worldwide Logistics, from signed contract to live deployment, and then to the use case after that.

You own delivery end to end: architecture, pipelines, integrations, and production rollout. In your first year, you'll write the SQL and integration code that gets customers into production and beyond, and build the reference architectures and delivery patterns the FDE team will run on. You'll have a direct line to Product and Engineering, and what you learn in customer environments will help shape the roadmap. This role is for someone who is comfortable owning an ambiguous, high-stakes problem inside someone else's codebase, and who wants to define a function rather than inherit one.

This role is based in our NYC office near Astor Place, with a minimum of 3 days per week in person. Travel 30–50% during active customer engagements, and less between them. You'll be onsite when it matters most: kickoffs, critical launches, and production cutovers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Own end-to-end technical delivery for a small number of flagship accounts, from architecture design through production cutover and beyond

- Build the connectors, SQL-based views, and integrations that put Materialize into production — Postgres and MySQL CDC, Kafka, Kinesis, dbt, BI tools, and customer applications

- Plan and run migrations from existing systems, including dual writes and controlled cutover

- Design Materialize architectures for real-time use cases: fraud detection, dynamic pricing, operational dashboards, context for AI agents, and event-driven pipelines

- Write and debug complex SQL and streaming pipelines directly in customer environments, alongside their engineering teams

- Support customers through implementation, production hardening, and critical launches