Principal Forward Deployed Data Scientist - Oil & Gas, Houston

Fundamental is an AI company pioneering the future of enterprise decision-making. Founded by DeepMind alumni, Fundamental has developed NEXUS – the world's most powerful Large Tabular Model (LTM) – purpose-built for the structured records that drive enterprise decisions. Backed by world-class investors and trusted by Fortune 100 companies, Fundamental unlocks trillions of dollars of value by giving businesses the Power to Predict.

About the role

Fundamental is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Data Scientist - Oil & Gas in Houston to facilitate the adoption of NEXUS and collaborate with customers to address complex technical challenges with an initial focus on Houston-based Oil & Gas customers. The Principal Data Scientist is an integral part of the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, driving the successful deployment of Fundamental products and proving value over legacy baselines or net new use cases. They work hand-in-hand with customers from the Proof of Value stage to post-implementation, ensuring solutions run securely in the client's production environment. In this role, you’ll manage customer relations involving multiple stakeholders (IT, C-suite, and data science teams) and function as a key bridge, translating field insights into the product roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Individually help deploy into production use cases with considerable business impact, moving from "science experiments" to definitive ROI.
• Work on rigorous head-to-head benchmarking against client baselines (XGBoost, LightGBM), executing data engineering, feature engineering, and validation.
• Collaborate with research and product teams to translate operational pain points and data anomalies into essential inputs for the Fundamental roadmap.
• Contribute to technical strategy to identify the right business problems, prevent data leakage, and handle "last mile" integration (VPC, on-prem, air-gapped).
• Collaborate with Sales and Solution Architect teams to align diverse stakeholders and explain predictions to business users.

Requirements

• PhD or master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or equivalent deep statistical literacy.
• 7+ years as a technical individual contributor in Data Science, Machine Learning, Applied Science, or ML Engineering.
• Strong experience working directly with customers or business stakeholders, ideally in complex enterprise or industrial environments.
• Experience with containerization (Docker), orchestration, and writing performant APIs (FastAPI/Flask).
• Mastery of the end-to-end pipeline, from framing and pre-processing to ML algorithms and validation strategies.
• Deep understanding of data handling (PySpark, Pandas) and memory optimization.
• Demonstrated experience optimizing models for specific business problems.
• Strong communication skills with an ability to translate architectural nuances into clear business value.

Skills

• Nice to have:
• Experience with PyTorch and cloud-native ML pipelines (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Prior experience or understanding of Oil & Gas, energy, utilities, industrials, logistics, or heavy asset environments.
• Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Staff Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, or Staff Data Scientist.
• Industry-based subject matter expertise.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation with salary and equity.
• Comprehensive health coverage for you and your dependents, including medical, dental, vision, and 401K.
• Paid parental leave for all new parents, inclusive of adoptive and surrogate journeys.
• Relocation support for employees moving to join the team in one of our office locations.
• A mission-driven, low-ego culture that values diversity of thought, ownership, and bias toward action.