LanceDB · 1 month ago
Forward Deployed Engineer
San Francisco
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level
$180K/yr - $250K/yrLanceDB is an open-source, cloud-native vector database and multimodal AI lakehouse. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will engage with strategic customers to design, deploy, and scale LanceDB in production environments while contributing production-quality code and feedback to the core product teams.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Information ServicesMachine Learning
Responsibilities
Lead on-site and remote technical deployments of LanceDB with enterprise and strategic customers, including architecture design, benchmarking, performance tuning, and operational hardening
Write and maintain production-grade code in Rust and Python for customer integrations, SDK enhancements, ingestion pipelines, and internal tooling
Contribute code upstream to LanceDB’s core repositories, including bug fixes, performance improvements, new features, and architectural refinements informed by customer use cases
Capture, distill, and communicate structured product feedback from customer engagements to product and core engineering teams, influencing roadmap and design decisions
Integrate LanceDB into existing data and AI infrastructure stacks, including Spark, Ray, and similar distributed processing frameworks
Diagnose and resolve complex issues involving distributed systems, cloud object storage, concurrency, and large-scale data movement
Partner closely with product, core engineering, and GTM teams to ensure customer requirements translate into generalizable, reusable platform capabilities
Deliver technical deep dives, workshops, and proofs-of-concept for engineers and architects at customer organizations
Qualification
Required
Proven experience building, deploying, or operating distributed, cloud-native databases or data platforms in production
Strong proficiency in Rust and Python, with a demonstrated ability to write performant, maintainable systems code
Hands-on familiarity with data infrastructure technologies such as Apache Spark, Ray, or similar distributed compute and data processing frameworks
Experience integrating databases with batch and streaming data pipelines, ML workflows, or large-scale analytics systems
Demonstrated ability to contribute directly to core product codebases, not just customer-specific glue or scripts
Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including sharding, replication, consistency, concurrency, and failure handling
Strong customer-facing skills, with the ability to work directly with engineers, architects, and technical leaders to drive solutions from concept to production
Preferred
Experience with vector databases, similarity search, or multimodal data systems
Prior contributions to open-source databases, storage engines, or distributed systems projects
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability tooling
Experience with Apache Arrow–based ecosystems, large-scale ML data pipelines, or AI infrastructure stacks
Company
LanceDB
LanceDB is a developer friendly, open source database for multi-modal AI. It is a sub-organization of Eto.
Founded in 2021
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
LanceDB has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$41MKey Investors
Theory VenturesCRV
2025-06-24Series A· $30M
2024-05-15Seed· $8M
2022-03-22Pre Seed· $3M
Leadership Team
Chang She
CEO / Co-Founder
Lei Xu
Co-Founder / CTO
Recent News
The Register
2025-10-14
2025-09-02
Company data provided by crunchbase