Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
A build-first Forward Deployed Engineer embedded with Seaboard Energy, spending 70-80% of the time hands-on building data pipelines, lakehouses, APIs, and AI-driven applications on Microsoft Fabric using AI-assisted development, plus orchestrating delivery and setting technical standards and patterns for the team.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Merriam, Kansas, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 4+ years of technical delivery experience
- Track record of shipping production software and data pipelines hands-on, including within the past 12 months
- Hands-on experience building data solutions on Microsoft Fabric or an equivalent modern cloud data platform
- Experience consuming APIs, including debugging integration failures
- Experience with data warehouse or lakehouse design patterns: medallion architecture, data modeling, and incremental load strategies
- Hands-on proficiency with AI-Assisted Development
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS) and modern DevOps and CI/CD practices
- Demonstrated ability to set technical patterns and standards that other engineers adopt
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team initiatives, manage stakeholders, and operate in ambiguity
- Ability to break large problems into small deliverable increments with frequent releases
- Understanding of business operations and ability to connect data and architecture decisions to business outcomes
Nice to have
- Knowledge of Foundry and AIP (ontology, AIP Logic, Workshop, Pipeline Builder), or equivalent enterprise data and ontology platform experience with ability to ramp quickly
- Background in the liquid fuels or oil and gas industry
- Background in manufacturing, logistics, or commodities
- Experience with Microsoft Fabric workloads: Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Dataflows Gen2, Notebooks, Pipelines, and/or Real-time Intelligence
- Experience with PySpark, SQL, and Python for data engineering work at production scale
- Experience building and maintaining semantic models
- Experience with Azure API Management, Azure Functions, or other Azure integration services
- Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related field
Full description
YOUR OPPORTUNITY
We have an exciting opportunity for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) supporting Seaboard Energy, based out of our Merriam, KS office. This role is build-first and embedded directly with the Energy business. It combines hands-on data work (gathering data, building and consuming APIs, and delivering on a modern data platform) with the innovation work of finding better ways to operate the business through a business ontology and the applications, agents, and tools built on top of it. Roughly 70 to 80% of the role is hands-on build using a data platform and AI-Assisted Development, 10% is orchestrating delivery (running standups, coordinating across the business and IT teams, clarifying priority, and confirming direction with leadership), and 10 to 20% is setting and operationalizing the technical patterns and standards the team follows. The FDE leads through the work, shipping the hardest, highest-leverage parts of an initiative and turning what they build into reusable patterns for the rest of the team.
ABOUT US
Seaboard Energy is a responsible renewable energy producer and part of Seaboard Corporation, a Fortune 500 company. We develop, operate, and grow renewable energy facilities that produce sustainable energy products — including renewable diesel, biodiesel, renewable naphtha, and glycerin — that are better for the planet. Working collaboratively with agriculturally based companies, including Seaboard Foods, we integrate renewable carbon sources into sustainable energy projects for the transportation, industrial, and agricultural markets, and provide Seaboard Corporation with renewable energy integration and business diversification. Guided by our values of Safety, Courage, Respect, Integrity, Innovation, and Trust, our team is building a better tomorrow.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
The work breaks down into three buckets:
· Hands-on build (70 to 80% of time)
- Own end-to-end delivery of the most complex parts of Energy's data and AI initiatives from scoping and design through build, test, and rollout. AI-Assisted Development is the primary delivery mode, with pro-code used where it is not enough.
- Gather, ingest, transform, and serve data across the Energy business — building the pipelines, lakehouses, semantic models, and OneLake medallion structures in the data platform (Dataflows Gen2, Notebooks in PySpark and SQL, and Fabric Pipelines) that make data reliably available for reporting, AI features, and downstream applications.
- Build or consume, and maintain APIs — designing clear contracts, implementing endpoints, and integrating with internal systems and external vendors so data flows where it is needed.
- Model and extend the business ontology in Foundry and AIP. This covers the objects, links, actions, and write-back paths that power agents, AIP Logic workflows, and internally built applications.