Forward Deployed Data Engineer

ZoomInfo is where careers accelerate, and they are seeking a Forward Deployed Data Engineer to define and operate their Forward Deployed Engineering function. This role involves engaging with strategic accounts to understand their data needs and delivering tailored intelligence applications that drive business outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Own Strategic Customer Engagements End-to-End Serve as the primary technical point of contact for assigned strategic accounts
• Run discovery sessions with data engineers, sales operations leaders, and revenue executives
• Diagnose the underlying problem (which is rarely the one the customer first describes — "we have a coverage gap" often turns out to be a marketability problem, "we don't trust the data" often turns out to be a matching problem)
• Scope the use case, design the solution, build the application, deploy it in the customer's environment, and stay accountable for the outcome — not just the delivery
• Bridge Technical and Business Audiences Sit with the sales team
• Present to executive leadership
• Synthesize complex go-to-market data needs into clear, actionable proposals — then deliver the solution
• You're equally comfortable whiteboarding matching architecture with a data engineering team, walking a sales operations director through disposition codes, and presenting ROI to a CRO
• Build the FDE Playbook Document what works: discovery frameworks, engagement phases, integration patterns, deliverable templates, success metrics
• The current strategic-account engagements are reference patterns — your job is to extract what's repeatable from each new account and turn it into a model that scales to additional strategic accounts, verticals, and eventually a team
• Feed field learnings back to product, engineering, and data teams to inform product direction and dataset priorities
• Drive Stickiness and Expansion Every application you build embeds ZoomInfo more deeply into the customer's daily workflows
• Identify expansion opportunities as they emerge — new use cases, new personas, new datasets, displacement opportunities against incumbent providers

Requirements:

• High Ownership, High Ambiguity Tolerance
• Strong Software and Data Engineering Fundamentals
• Proficient in Python and SQL
• Comfortable working in cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar)
• Experience building or substantially working with data pipelines, entity matching or deduplication logic, API integrations, and applications that real users depend on daily
• Familiarity with API tooling — GraphQL, REST, Postman, authentication patterns (JWT, OAuth)
• Comfortable navigating and integrating against APIs quickly
• Work fluently in LLM-based development environments like Claude Code or Codex
• Customer-Facing Communication
• Experience working directly with customers in a technical capacity — solutions engineering, consulting, technical account management, or a previous FDE role
• Ability to synthesize complex data needs for an executive audience and discuss matching architecture with a data engineering team
• Comfortable navigating enterprise environments with competing stakeholders — sales operations, IT, marketing ops, finance, and revenue leadership
• Go-to-Market Data Familiarity
• Experience working with B2B data, CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot), enrichment and orchestration tooling (RingLead, Clearbit, Demandbase), or similar go-to-market infrastructure
• Familiarity with concepts like firmographic enrichment, entity resolution, hierarchy management, TAM modeling, intent data, and account-based prospecting