Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own solution design and implementation for our Identity Resolution (IDR) product. This role is a blend of data analytics and data engineering, and is an opportunity to work directly with data, marketing, and executive teams at household-name companies. You'll spend time working with the customer to learn about their data architecture, reason about how Hightouch can accomplish their goals, set up deployments, and debug issues.

This role is hands on and technical. You’ll become intimately familiar with our customers’ data and business goals. This expertise frequently leads to us advising executives at Fortune 500 companies on their long term data strategy. You'll spend time helping customers decide how their global identity spines should be configured, you'll set up implementations for them, and you'll debug inevitable issues with real data. You'll work closely with Sales Engineering on pre-sales deals and with Customer Support Engineering and Technical Account Management on post-sales implementations—serving as the subject matter expert for data engineering and analytics across the customer lifecycle.

You'll work with coding agents as a default: the SQL, schema spelunking, and internal tooling in this role gets built with agents - and you’ll help grow our repository of skills and best practices so we all get faster.

About Hightouch Identity Resolution (IDR)

Imagine you're a sprawling enterprise business with 20+ brands. Each brand collects different data elements from each of their customers and joins using different identifiers. Hightouch IDR can look across the customer data stored in each brand and provide a golden source of truth using all the available data, while obeying any regulatory restrictions that prevent data sharing. The product is highly configurable, and so no two customer data architectures are the same.

Solution Architecture & Implementation Consulting

• Work backwards from end goals: Customers ultimately don't care about IDR itself, but about the use cases that a good identity spine powers. You’ll pair with an architect to work backwards from the customer’s use cases to a set of IDR rules and a data model that enables those use cases
• Assess fit and feasibility: During pre-sales, understand the customer’s data landscape and maturity, assessing how much work will be needed to get their data ready for IDR. Understand the rules of any current solutions (e.g., Reltio, Amperity, Segment, MDM tools) and identify, flag, and create workarounds for any gaps.

Technical Support & Debugging

• Debug customer issues end-to-end: Investigate perceived issues and discrepancies in identity such as missing datapoints and over-merging scenarios. Most debugging involves writing SQL against customer warehouses and reading server logs.
• Explain IDR behavior to customers: Help customers understand how warehouse-native identity resolution works and detailed nuances of how it processes data incrementally or how to utilize its outcome tables.
• Surface product gaps: When you see the same issue repeatedly (e.g., no retroactive data removal, insufficient observability into profile changes, inability to reset incremental processing watermarks), flag and advocate for fixes.

• You direct agents, you don't just prompt them. You'll point them at warehouses with undocumented tables and no reliable dictionary, and you'll be the last judgment before what they build ships to millions of people. You reach for an agent before a blank editor, but you scrutinize every line before it goes out.
• SQL Fluency: Anyone can generate a thousand lines of SQL now. You're hired because you can read them and find the join that's wrong. Fluent in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, with query performance and warehouse cost as things you think about unprompted.
• Systems thinking: You can reason about how identity graphs behave at scale, understand trade-offs between different architecture choices, and anticipate downstream consequences of design decisions.
• Consultative communication: You can run a discovery call, ask the right questions to understand requirements, and explain technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Systematic debugging mindset: You naturally form hypotheses, test them, and document findings. When you see "missing data," you think through timestamps, model definitions, and PK validity before jumping to conclusions.
• 2-4 years in an analytics engineering, solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, or implementation role—ideally at a data infrastructure, CDP, or B2B SaaS company.

Nice to Have

• Experience with identity resolution, MDM, or CDP products (Segment, Amperity, Reltio, LiveRamp)
• Familiarity with graph data structures and entity resolution algorithms
• Experience with probabilistic matching or ML-based identity systems
• Background in data engineering or analytics engineering
• Comfort with customer-facing presentations and on-site meetings

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $225,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity.