Fundamental

Data Scientist (Forward Deployed) at Fundamental (United States)

Fundamental· United States·

Role details

Work type
Remote
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

ABOUT FUNDAMENTAL

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 actually 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.

At Fundamental, you'll work on unprecedented technical challenges in foundation model development and build technology that transforms how the world's largest companies make decisions. This is your opportunity to be part of a category-defining company from the ground-up. Join the team defining the future of enterprise AI.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Fundamental is seeking a Forward deployed Data Scientist to facilitate the adoption of NEXUS and collaborate with customers to address complex technical challenges.

The Data Scientist is an integral part of our FDE team, which is dedicated to 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 our solutions run securely in the client's production heartbeat.

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 our product roadmap.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

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

MUST HAVE

  • You hold a PhD / master in CS / Math / Stats or you have equivalent deep statistical literacy
  • You have 2+ years as a technical individual contributor (data scientist or software engineer)
  • You have experience with containerization (Docker), orchestration, and writing performant APIs (FastAPI/Flask)
  • You master the end-to-end pipeline, from framing, pre-processing, ml algorithm and validation strategies
  • You have a deep understanding of data handling (PySpark, Pandas) and memory optimization
  • You have demonstrated experience optimizing models for a specific business problem
  • You hold strong communication skills with an ability to translate architectural nuances into clear business value

NICE TO HAVE

  • Experience with PyTorch and cloud-native ML pipelines (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • 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

Why work at Fundamental

  • Solve hard problems: Work on groundbreaking research and engineering for a new modality of AI (tabular data) that most labs ignore.
  • Exceptional team: Collaborate with DeepMind alumni and top researchers from Cohere, AI21 Labs, Google DeepMind, Mistral AI, and others.
  • Global and flexible: Hubs in San Francisco (HQ), Barcelona (research), and remote‑friendly roles across Europe and the US.
  • Rapid growth: Joining a well‑funded, high‑valuation startup at Series A stage with real revenue and Fortune 100 customers—clear trajectory.
  • Mission‑driven: “Power to Predict” aims to transform decision‑making in enterprises and governments, offering tangible societal impact.
  • Culture: Described as rigorous, ambitious, and supportive of deep research and patient engineering.

Application questions