Senior Forward Deployed Data Engineer

Akkio is the AI infrastructure platform that powers and automates workflows across the media ecosystem. As a Senior Forward Deployed Data Engineer, you will work directly with media agency customers to solve their data challenges, owning the technical delivery of customer implementations and building bespoke data pipelines.

Responsibilities:

• Embed directly with media agency customers to understand their data infrastructure, workflows, and business objectives
• Own end-to-end technical delivery of customer implementations from initial scoping through production deployment and ongoing optimization
• Design and build custom data pipelines, integrations, and transformations that connect customer data sources to Akkio's AI platform
• Take full ownership of complex data engineering projects from planning to deployment
• Implement security and compliance measures to protect sensitive client data
• Build and maintain production data infrastructure with proper monitoring, alerting, and documentation
• Feed learnings from customer deployments back to the product team to influence platform roadmap and feature development
• Establish trusted advisor relationships with customer technical and business stakeholders
• Navigate diverse technical environments and adapt solutions to each customer's existing data infrastructure
• Travel regularly to customer sites for onboarding, implementation sprints, and strategic planning sessions
• Mentor junior engineers and establish data engineering best practices
• Communicate project milestones and progress clearly to stakeholders

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as a data engineer with proven ability to deliver complex projects in customer-facing or consulting environments
• Strong SQL skills and experience with at least one large cloud database (especially Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks)
• Strong data modeling skills, including when to normalize vs denormalize data and understanding of various schema design patterns
• Expert in Python for production data pipelines, with experience using modern orchestration tools like dbt or Airflow
• Experience building large scale backend services in Python
• Excellent communication skills. Equally comfortable presenting to C-level executives and debugging code with engineers
• Excited by customer-facing work and energized by seeing your solutions drive real business impact
• Skilled at prompting and working with AI systems for data tasks, leveraging LLMs for data transformation, cleaning, schema mapping, and analysis
• Strong bias to execution coupled with high engineering standards and attention to detail
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Strong experience with large language models (LLMs) and their applications in data analytics
• Experienced at integrating AI tools into data workflows to accelerate delivery and improve data quality
• Knowledge of data visualization and analytics tools
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Understanding of security best practices for handling sensitive data
• Previous startup experience, particularly in early-stage companies