Lead Software Engineer - ( Forward Deployed Engineer ) Santa Clara, CA

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to serve as a senior technical leader at the intersection of product engineering, platform architecture, and enterprise customer success. In this role, you will own the most complex and high-impact customer-facing technical challenges across the Eightfold platform. You will design and implement scalable solutions for enterprise customers, lead technical escalations, influence product direction based on real-world customer needs, and mentor engineers across teams.

What You Will Do

• Customer-Driven Product & Platform Development
• Design and build customer-facing enhancements, integrations, and custom workflows that scale across the platform.
• Translate enterprise customer requirements into durable, reusable platform capabilities.
• Influence product and engineering roadmaps by identifying patterns across customer needs.
• Balance short-term customer demands with long-term platform health and architectural integrity.
• Technical Leadership & Ownership
• Own end-to-end design and implementation of complex, cross-cutting features spanning multiple services or product areas.
• Drive architectural decisions focused on reliability, performance, extensibility, and maintainability.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Platform Engineering, and Applied AI teams to deliver solutions aligned with customer outcomes.
• Enterprise Customer Engineering & Escalations
• Act as the primary technical escalation point for the most critical enterprise customer issues across all Eightfold products.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues involving distributed systems, large-scale data, and integrations.
• Work directly with Customer Success, Solutions Engineering, and Support teams to deliver timely, high-quality resolutions.
• Lead root cause analysis and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Deep engagement with customer issues, the focus of this role will be on engineering durable solutions, improving platform capabilities, and eliminating entire classes of problems.
• Mentorship & Engineering Excellence
• Mentor and guide junior and mid-level engineers, especially within customer engineering and escalation workflows.
• Lead design reviews and code reviews with an emphasis on scalability and operational readiness.
• Establish best practices for observability, debugging, testing, and incident response in customer-facing systems.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems at scale.
• Strong backend engineering experience (e.g., Java, Python, Scala, or similar) with distributed systems.
• Proven experience handling enterprise customer escalations and complex production issues.
• Deep understanding of system design, APIs, data pipelines, and service-oriented or microservices architectures.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments with competing customer and platform priorities.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Hands-on experience building frontend applications with React, Angular, and related UI frameworks.
• Strong communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Customer Engineering and/or Solutions Engineering, within a SaaS company.
• Familiarity with enterprise integrations, data ingestion pipelines, and customer-specific configurations.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and production monitoring tools.
• Exposure to AI/ML-enabled platforms or data-intensive products.

Why Join Eightfold.ai

• Make a direct impact on some of the world’s largest enterprise customers.
• Solve highly complex, real-world technical problems with visibility across the entire platform.
• Operate as a technical leader with significant ownership and influence.
• Work closely with customers, product leaders, and engineering teams to shape the future of the Eightfold platform.