Forward Deployed Strategist
AI summary of the role
Forward Deployed Strategist owns the technical direction of Chalk's customer integrations, working alongside sales, delivery, and support to advise on architecture, design solutions on Chalk, and scope POCs.
What you’ll do
- Run technical discovery to understand customer systems, pain points, and shipping goals
- Advise on customer architecture and migration paths, including what will break and sequencing
- Design solutions on Chalk with clear bars for correctness, latency, and cost
- Design and scope tight POCs that prove the right thing without scope drift
What you’ll bring
- Real depth in production infrastructure and how live systems fail
- Track record of advising engineering teams on systems you didn't build
- Strong Python and SQL for prototyping and reading customer codebases
- Ability to scope POCs that prove the thing and nothing else
Technologies
Python · SQL · Rust · C++ · AI agents · machine learning · inference · feature platform
About Chalk
Compute-first feature platform for AI and ML teams that defines features once, serves them in real time, and keeps training and inference consistent.
Series A · 50–100 people
Source and classification
Deployment strategy · Evidence for this classification:
About Chalk Chalk is building the data platform that powers the future of machine learning applications. We tear down complexity, latency, and scale barriers that have traditionally constrained ML capabilities. Our platform combines Rust-speed performance with elegant tools that developers love to use. Leading companies depend on Chalk for everything from stopping fraudulent credit card swipes, verifying identities, and maximizing clean energy capture. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A, led by Felicis. About the role Chalk is the AI data platform built for inference. Customers come to us for two halves of the same problem: the context their models and agents run on, and the runtime they run in. Both sit inside the customer's own cloud. Forward Deployed Strategists owns the technical direction of Chalk’s integrations: what gets built, in what order, and whether it holds
More from the job description
About Chalk Chalk is building the data platform that powers the future of machine learning applications. We tear down complexity, latency, and scale barriers that have traditionally constrained ML capabilities. Our platform combines Rust-speed performance with elegant tools that developers love to use. Leading companies depend on Chalk for everything from stopping fraudulent credit card swipes, verifying identities, and maximizing clean energy capture. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A, led by Felicis. About the role Chalk is the AI data platform built for inference. Customers come to us for two halves of the same problem: the context their models and agents run on, and the runtime they run in. Both sit inside the customer's own cloud. Forward Deployed Strategists owns the technical direction of Chalk’s integrations: what gets built, in what order, and whether it holds up. You sit alongside sales, delivery, account management, and support on your accounts, and you’re the technical judge across all of it. You’ll work closely with FDEs, who build directly with customer engineering teams. Some of that work is model-driven: fraud, payments, underwriting, recommendations, pricing. Increasingly it is agentic. Investigation agents that sit alongside data scientists, workflow automation, trust and safety, customer support, all of it running against real production conte [... source excerpt omitted ...] with the customer's architecture rather than ours. You will be asked to weigh in on systems Chalk does not touch. The bar for this role is architectural depth and judgment. What you will do Run technical discovery: get inside how a customer's systems work, what is breaking, and what they are trying to ship Advise on their architecture and their plans, including the migration path off whatever they run today. Tell them plainly what will break, what to sequence first, and what is not worth doing Design what they build on Chalk, and set the bar it has to clear on correctness, latency, and cost Design agentic solutions on Chalk: what an agent is allowed to reach, how it gets ev [... source excerpt omitted ...] ope, and execute tight POCs. Pick the one thing worth proving, define what a clean result looks like before anyone starts, and keep the scope from drifting Answer the questions a customer's principal engineers ask in week three. Partner with sales on the accounts where the decision is being made Find the work worth doing next, and judge honestly whether it is a fit Break work into projects with clear owners and dates, and hand the deep build work to the delivery engineers who will do it Work with account management and support to keep the technical direction of an account coherent once it is live Take what you learn in the field back to product and engineering, and argue for
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