Forward Deployed Engineer

FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER Location: Mountain View, CA — Downtown HQ Employment Type: Full-time Work Model: On-site, 5 days/week Department: Go-to-Market / Eng. ABOUT GRANICA Granica helps enterprises run AI for less, from the data layer to agent execution. Granica is building across three related layers: - Crunch reduces storage and processing costs across enterprise data infrastructure. - Large Tabular Models unlock predictions and generated data from governed enterprise tables. - Myelin reduces token and compute overhead for long-running AI agents. Everything runs inside the customer’s perimeter, so enterprises retain control of their data and the intelligence it creates. Granica has already processed hundreds of petabytes of enterprise data in production for customers including Snap, Pinterest, Lyft, and ShareChat. Our research organization is led by Stanford Professor Andrea Montanari. We operate at the intersection of data infrastructure, AI systems, and applied research, building the efficiency and intelligence layer for enterprise AI. THE ROLE We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with customers across some of the world’s largest and most complex data environments. You’ll sit at the intersection of customers, Engineering, Product, and Sales — diagnosing technical problems, deploying Granica, running evaluations, and translating what you learn in the field into better customer outcomes and product decisions. You’ll move comfortably between customer conversations, Spark debugging, SQL and performance analysis, architecture discussions, benchmarking, and infrastructure economics. This is a hands-on role for someone who can operate independently in ambiguous customer environments and help build the foundations of Granica’s forward-deployed function. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Work directly with enterprise customers to understand workloads, architecture, performance bottlenecks, and infrastructure costs. - Deploy, configure, and troubleshoot Granica in complex production environments. - Diagnose Apache Spark performance and reliability issues across jobs, stages, executors, shuffles, skew, memory, and distributed execution. - Design and run proofs of value, benchmarks, and technical evaluations with clear, defensible measurements. - Partner with Sales, Product, and Engineering to turn customer findings into recommendations, product feedback, and repeatable FDE playbooks. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - Significant experience in data infrastructure, distributed systems, data engineering, forward deployment, solutions architecture, or a similarly technical customer-facing role. - Deep hands-on experience with Apache Spark in production, including debugging and performance tuning. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and technologies such as Iceberg, Delta Lake, Parquet, Hive, and object storage. - Strong SQL skills and hands-on programming ability in Python, Scala, or Java. - Strong customer-facing judgment, technical communication, and comfort operating with ambiguity and high ownership. BONUS - Experience as an FDE, Resident Solutions Architect, Solutions Architect, or deeply technical Solutions Engineer. - Experience with Databricks, AWS EMR/Glue, Confluent, Cloudera/Hortonworks, or comparable data infrastructure platforms. - Experience with table maintenance, compaction, file layout, query optimization, metadata systems, or storage/compute efficiency. - Experience helping build a customer-facing technical function at an early-stage company. - Experience operating directly inside large-scale enterprise Spark or lakehouse environments. WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS Granica’s customer environments are growing rapidly in both scale and complexity. The products are real. The customers are real. The technical problems are deep. But core Engineering cannot remain the front line for every deployment, performance issue, evaluation, and customer escalation as the company scales. You won’t inherit a mature FDE organization or established playbook. You’ll help build the function, solve the hardest customer problems, and shape how Granica scales from hundreds of petabytes toward exabyte-scale infrastructure. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and performance bonus for top performers - 401(k) with company match, comprehensive health coverage, and unlimited PTO - Daily catered meals in our Mountain View office - Support for research, publication, and conference participation At Granica, you'll help build the next generation of enterprise AI—from exabyte-scale data infrastructure, Large Tabular Models (LTMs), and stateful AI agents. Together, we're creating the infrastructure that enables enterprises to own their data, own the intelligence built on it, and scale both efficiently.