Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineer — Operational AI

The opportunity

As AI moves from analysis into action, enterprises need more than intelligent models. They need an operational fabric that connects agents to current reality—with authoritative state, relevant context, and the controls to act safely.

As a Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineer at Aerospike, you will work directly with Global 2000 engineering teams to build that fabric. You will own the technical solution from problem discovery and architecture through implementation, production validation, and iteration—combining strong software engineering with a deep understanding of customer operations.

Reporting to the CTO/CPO, you will connect customer challenges with product and engineering development. Your work must deliver production outcomes for customers and create reusable capabilities, reference architectures, and evidence that shape Aerospike’s Operational AI direction.

What you’ll build

• Authoritative State: Engineer the real-time foundation for business, agent, session, and workflow state. Support concurrent reads and writes against continuously changing reality, with explicit requirements for freshness, consistency, and recovery.
• Relevant Context: Assemble timely, permission-aware context from enterprise data, vector search, and graph relationships so agents make decisions grounded in current reality.
• Control and Guardrails: Build policy checks, access boundaries, execution limits, approval gates, and human intervention paths around agent actions.
• Compliance and Traceability: Translate customer security and governance requirements into enforceable controls and auditable records of context, decisions, actions, and state changes.
• The Continuous Operating Loop: Connect Authoritative State → Relevant Context → Decision → Action → Consequence → Updated State, ensuring each outcome informs the next cycle.

What you’ll do

• Embed with customer engineers and domain experts to turn ambiguous operational problems into clear architectures, engineering milestones, and measurable acceptance criteria.
• Design, code, and integrate production solutions across Aerospike, enterprise data systems, AI frameworks, and agent orchestration layers.
• Own the technical integrity of the Operational AI solution through production: validate behavior, resolve difficult systems issues, and iterate with users against real workloads.
• Test latency, throughput, context freshness, concurrent state updates, failure recovery, authorization, and guardrail behavior—not just model outputs.
• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Field Engineering to close platform gaps and turn field learning into reusable code, tools, reference implementations, and product improvements.
• Lead technical reviews, explain tradeoffs to engineers and executives, mentor delivery partners, and document how solutions can be operated and extended.

How you’ll lead

• Set a clear direction for the FDE team, translating Aerospike’s Operational AI strategy into engineering priorities and measurable outcomes.
• Hire, coach, and develop FDEs through clear expectations, regular feedback, performance management, and career development.
• Set priorities and allocate capacity across customer engagements, balancing strategic value, delivery commitments, and team workload.
• Stay close to the work through coding, design and code reviews, and hands-on debugging—while delegating ownership and avoiding becoming a bottleneck.
• Build a high-trust engineering culture with strong quality standards, clear accountability, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning.

How you’ll work with customer teams

FDE owns Operational AI solution engineering and its technical outcomes through production. Professional Services partners on standard Aerospike deployment, migration, configuration, and operational readiness. Technical Account Management leads the ongoing technical advisory relationship and account coordination.

You will collaborate across these teams without becoming the default owner of routine implementation, account management, or support. Your primary contribution is engineering working Operational AI systems and making what you learn reusable across customers.

What you’ll bring

• A strong track record of building and delivering production software, distributed systems, or enterprise data platforms.
• Strong coding skills in at least one of Java, Go, Python, or C/C++, with practical experience in APIs, data modeling, and high-throughput or low-latency systems.
• Hands-on experience delivering AI applications or agent workflows, including state management, retrieval, context assembly, and evaluation.
• Experience implementing authorization, policy enforcement, auditability, and sensitive-data controls in enterprise environments.
• Sound judgment about concurrency, consistency, resilience, security, and operational tradeoffs.
• The ability to lead with limited direction, work effectively with customers, and take ambiguous problems from discovery to reliable production.
• Demonstrated experience managing engineers while remaining technically hands-on, including hiring, coaching, performance feedback, and developing technical leaders.
• Strong delegation, prioritization, and stakeholder-management skills, with the judgment to balance direct contribution against team leadership across multiple engagements.

Helpful experience

• Aerospike database, vector search, graph, or cloud capabilities.
• Multi-agent coordination, durable execution, checkpointing, or human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Cloud and hybrid deployments, streaming architectures, containers, and infrastructure automation.

What success looks like

Customers operate dependable AI systems that use current, authorized state and context, act within defined controls, and feed outcomes back into the next operating cycle. Your impact is measured by production outcomes, reusable engineering assets, and product improvements—not billable utilization or account coverage.

Reports to: CTO/CPO | Location: Remote | Travel: As needed

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.

To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.