Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About RisingWaveRisingWave is a next-generation cloud-native streaming database that makes real-time data processing simple, affordable, and highly scalable. Teams use RisingWave to build continuous, low-latency pipelines and power real-time dashboards, AI/ML features, and business-critical analytics — all with familiar SQL. Our customers span financial services, digital natives, gaming, manufacturing, and more.About the RoleWe're looking for our first Forward Deployed Engineer to help define what world-class customer engineering looks like at RisingWave.As a Founding FDE, you'll work directly with engineering teams at some of the most innovative companies, helping them deploy production-scale streaming systems and solve complex distributed systems problems. You'll optimize architectures and unblock customers on their most critical workloads.This is a highly hands-on engineering role. You'll spend the majority of your time building—not creating slides. You'll develop reference implementations, troubleshoot production issues, and work alongside our core engineering team to influence the product roadmap.Because you'll be the first FDE, you'll also help build the function itself. You'll establish best practices, create reusable playbooks, mentor future FDEs, and shape how RisingWave engages technically with customers as the team grows.What You'll DoEmbed with customer engineering teams to design, build, and deploy production streaming applications.Design and optimize end-to-end real-time architectures spanning Kafka, CDC, databases, lakehouses, object storage, AI pipelines, and Kubernetes.Diagnose and resolve complex distributed systems issues involving performance, scalability, networking, storage, and reliability.Lead technical evaluations and rapidly prototype solutions that prove business value.Partner closely with Product and Engineering to translate customer pain points into product improvements and new capabilities.Build reusable reference architectures, sample applications, SDKs, and open-source tooling that accelerate future customer deployments.Contribute directly to the RisingWave product and ecosystem when customer needs uncover opportunities.Mentor and onboard future FDEs, helping establish engineering standards, customer engagement models, and implementation playbooks.What We're Looking For7+ years in Solutions Architecture, Sales Engineering, or Technical Consulting building distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, databases, or data platforms.Deep understanding of distributed systems, data streaming/analytics or event-driven architectures, and modern data infrastructure.Experience with Kubernetes and major clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure); working understanding of cloud networking/security patterns (e.g., VPC peering/PrivateLink, IAM).Strong experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures.Excellent SQL skills and experience optimizing analytical or streaming workloads.Experience debugging complex production systems across compute, networking, storage, and application layers.Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence engineers, architects, and executives alike.What Makes You Stand OutBuilt customer-facing engineering or solutions organizations from the ground up.Experience with Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, or other distributed data systems.Strong working knowledge of CDC frameworks (Debezium, Kafka Connect) and data formats (Avro/Protobuf/JSON).Familiarity with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Kafka Connect, or modern lakehouse technologies.Strong systems programming experience in Rust or Go.Why Join UsThis isn't just another Forward Deployed Engineering role—it's an opportunity to build the function from the ground up.You'll work directly with our founders and engineering leadership, influence the product roadmap, solve some of the hardest real-time data problems in the industry, and help define how RisingWave partners with customers for years to come.As our first FDE, your impact will extend beyond individual customer engagements. You'll establish the technical standards, mentoring culture, and engineering practices that future Forward Deployed Engineers build upon.If you're excited by ownership, enjoy writing code as much as solving customer problems, and want to help build a category-defining data platform, we'd love to hear from you.