Senior Forward Deployed Data Engineer

Akkio is the AI infrastructure that automates campaign workflows for the world's largest media agencies and data providers. Our platform runs on-premises within our partners' cloud environments, sits directly on top of their data, and enables teams to productionize agentic AI workflows at enterprise scale with full security and governance control.

Our approach already powers some of the biggest names in media. Havas Media Network scales agentic AI globally on Akkio. Horizon Media strengthened its blu. platform with Akkio and won an $800M account. Mediaplus built Plus.AI, its global AI media planning system, on our infrastructure. LG Ad Solutions uses Akkio to unlock real-time intelligence from ACR data.

We're a small, fast-growing team, and every person here shapes what media's biggest players do next.

We build with AI the way we expect our partners to run on it: aggressively, thoughtfully, and in production. Agentic coding is foundational to how our engineering team works. Our engineers orchestrate coding agents to move from idea to shipped product at a pace that would be impossible by hand, and they hold that output to a high bar for quality, testing, and reliability.

If you've rebuilt your workflow around agents, maintaining context files for your repos, running agents on real production work, publishing MCP servers, or rethinking how code review works when an agent writes the first draft, you'll feel at home. If you're still evaluating whether AI coding tools are ready, this probably isn't the right role.

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer at Akkio, you'll embed directly with the world's largest media agencies and build whatever it takes to make agentic AI work in their environment — integrations, backend services, data workflows, agent configurations, and internal tools alike. You'll own technical delivery end-to-end, from initial scoping through production deployment, and serve as the technical bridge between the customer's teams and ours.

This is a generalist engineering role by design. Forward deployed problems don't respect specialty boundaries: one week the blocker is a data integration, the next it's an agent workflow, an API, or a quick internal tool that unblocks a whole team. We're looking for engineers who see the whole problem, pick up whatever layer of the stack it lives in, and drive to a working solution in production.

This role is built for owners. Requirements in the field are rarely fully defined and often shift as we learn from customers. We're looking for someone who treats that as the fun part: someone who takes a partially-shaped problem, drives it to a well-shaped solution, and ships a great product without waiting for a full spec. The role requires regular travel to customer sites to work face-to-face with agencies who value hands-on partnership, and your insights from the field will directly shape Akkio's product direction.

• Embed directly with media agency customers to understand their infrastructure, workflows, and business objectives

• Own end-to-end technical delivery of customer implementations, from initial scoping through production deployment and ongoing optimization

• Build across the stack as the problem demands: integrations and data workflows connecting customer systems to Akkio, backend services, agent and workflow configurations, and the occasional internal tool that unblocks a customer team

• Multiply your output with agentic coding and help raise the bar for how forward deployed work gets built and delivered

• Navigate diverse technical environments and adapt solutions to each customer's existing infrastructure

• Establish trusted advisor relationships with customer technical and business stakeholders

• Implement security and compliance measures that protect sensitive customer data

• Feed learnings from customer deployments back to the product team to influence platform roadmap and feature development

• Travel regularly to customer sites for onboarding, implementation sprints, and strategic planning sessions

• Set engineering standards for code quality and testing in an agent-assisted codebase, and mentor teammates on both

• Communicate project milestones and progress clearly to stakeholders as requirements evolve

• 5+ years of software engineering experience across the stack, with a track record of delivering complex projects in customer-facing, consulting, or forward deployed environments

• You've deeply integrated AI coding into your daily workflow; agents are your default way of building, not an occasional assist and you can speak concretely about how you direct them, where they fail, and how you verify their output

• You thrive on ownership: you've repeatedly taken loosely defined or shifting requirements and delivered great products anyway, filling gaps with judgment rather than waiting for direction

• A generalist's range: strong production Python, working fluency with SQL and cloud data platforms, and comfort picking up unfamiliar systems, APIs, and tools quickly

• Experience building and debugging production systems in environments you didn't design, with proper monitoring, alerting, and documentation

• Strong background with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure) and modern DevOps practices

• 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

• Strong bias to execution coupled with high engineering standards and attention to detail

• Public artifacts of your agentic workflow: CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md context files in your repos, published MCP servers, agent co-authored commit history, or writing about how you build with agents

• Hands-on experience building with large language models: evals, tool use, agent orchestration, or LLM-powered product features

• Deep experience with a major cloud data platform (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks) and orchestration tools like dbt or Airflow

• Previous forward deployed, solutions engineering, or technical consulting experience at an enterprise software company

• Familiarity with the media, advertising, or marketing analytics domain

• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Understanding of security best practices for handling sensitive data

• Previous early-stage startup experience

Build at the frontier. You'll work on a team that's genuinely all-in on agentic development, with the tools, budget, and encouragement to push what's possible with AI coding. What most companies call an experiment, we call Tuesday. You'll get better at this craft faster here than almost anywhere.

Ride real acceleration. Akkio is a well-funded startup in a rapidly accelerating phase with major enterprise partners in production, expanding global deployments, and a market that's moving toward us. Joining now means real ownership of outcomes and real upside: substantial equity, outsized scope, and a direct line from your work to company results.

Work with an exceptional team. Our team is small and accomplished, composed of people who've built and scaled products at top companies and chose to do the ambitious thing here. Our culture is built around shared wins: high trust, low ego, and the expectation that everyone operates like an owner.

• Location: Remote-first company with no central office location. This position is fully remote, with regular travel to customer sites.

• Compensation: Competitive salary range depending on experience, plus substantial equity grants

• Benefits: Health, dental, and vision insurance; 401(k) plan; generous PTO policy

• Authorization: Must be authorized to work in the US

Akkio is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, and we believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.

To all recruitment agencies: Akkio does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or Akkio employees. Akkio is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.