---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Granica'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-granica-bay-area-3mqk9yj6gyez'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Granica

- **Company:** Granica
- **Location:** Bay Area
- **Compensation:** $160k–$220k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/granica/165a62b6-014d-4d83-a800-a0ff3b205745

## Job description

## FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER / SALES ENGINEER

Location: Mountain View, CA — On-site

## ABOUT GRANICA

Granica builds AI infrastructure for enterprises operating massive data environments.

Our platform helps data and engineering teams reduce storage and compute costs, improve performance and reliability, and prepare large datasets for analytics and AI.

Granica’s products include:

- Crunch — continuous optimization for enterprise lakehouse data
- Myelin — stateful infrastructure for long-running AI agents
- Large Tabular Models — foundation models designed for enterprise tables

Together, we are building the infrastructure that enables enterprises to own their data, own the intelligence built on it, and scale both efficiently.

Granica has demonstrated approximately $200K in annualized value per petabyte and verified customer value within weeks.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

Granica is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer / Sales Engineer to lead technical engagements with enterprise customers from initial discovery through evaluation and deployment.

You will work directly with data platform teams, engineers, architects, and technical executives to understand their environments, identify high-value use cases, design proofs of value, and demonstrate measurable technical and economic impact.

This is a hands-on role for someone who can operate across customer engineering, technical sales, product, and engineering.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Lead technical discovery with enterprise data, infrastructure, and AI teams
- Understand customer architecture, workloads, constraints, and business priorities
- Design and execute proofs of value with clear success criteria
- Deploy and configure Granica in complex customer environments
- Analyze data-platform performance, reliability, and infrastructure costs
- Troubleshoot issues across data, compute, permissions, networking, and integrations
- Partner with Account Executives throughout complex enterprise sales cycles
- Present technical findings and business value to engineering and executive stakeholders
- Translate customer feedback into product and engineering priorities
- Build repeatable technical playbooks and evaluation frameworks

## WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- 5+ years in Forward Deployed Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Data Engineering, or a similar technical customer-facing role
- Deep hands-on expertise with Apache Spark, including debugging, performance tuning, cluster behavior, and production workloads
- Strong knowledge of modern data platforms, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience with lakehouse technologies such as Iceberg, Delta Lake, or comparable systems
- Proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language
- Experience leading enterprise technical evaluations, proofs of concept, or deployments
- Strong troubleshooting and customer communication skills
- High ownership and comfort operating in a fast-moving startup
- Ability to travel to customer locations when required

## WHY JOIN GRANICA

- Work on foundational infrastructure for enterprise data and AI
- Partner directly with customers, company leadership, Product, and Engineering
- Help define Granica’s technical GTM motion and Forward Deployed Engineering function
- Join an early-stage team solving high-value infrastructure problems at massive scale
- Have direct influence on product direction, customer outcomes, and company growth

## COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and performance bonus for top performers
- 401(k) with company match, comprehensive health coverage, and unlimited PTO
- Daily catered meals in our Mountain View office
- Support for research, publication, and conference participation

At Granica, you'll help build the next generation of enterprise AI—from exabyte-scale data infrastructure, Large Tabular Models (LTMs), and stateful AI agents. Together, we're creating the infrastructure that enables enterprises to own their data, own the intelligence built on it, and scale both efficiently.

## About Granica

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Granica builds self-optimizing data infrastructure that compresses enterprise tabular data and enables structured intelligence for AI workloads.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: AI Infrastructure, Data Compression, Research Services
- Target customers: Enterprise B2B — SaaS, consumer-internet, healthcare, and transportation companies with petabyte-scale data estates
- Mission or purpose statement: "Turning entropy to intelligence" — building a new class of data infrastructure that makes data estates efficient, reliable, and steerable for AI

## Products & Services
- **[Crunch]**: A self-optimizing, lossless compression layer for structured data (Iceberg, Delta, Trino, Spark, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks). Reduces storage by 45–80% and cuts cloud query spend by 15–35%. Deploys inside a customer's VPC with zero code changes and zero downtime. Continuously adapts to query patterns and data drift.
- **[EΣL (Extract, Signify, Load)]**: A reimagining of ETL. During "Signify," the system learns distributions, keys, and temporal drift while storing data, enabling real-time inference over a latent space without scanning cold blocks.
- **[Large Tabular Models]**: In-development systems that learn cross-column and relational structure to deliver trustworthy answers and automation with provenance and governance.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $45.0M (Series A, June 2023)
- **Lead Investor**: New Enterprise Associates (led the $45M Series A, with 6 total investors)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: New Enterprise Associates, plus 5 other undisclosed institutional investors
- **Growth Signals**: 44.4% headcount growth year-over-year (35 employees), LinkedIn followers up 238.9% yearly, active 9 open job postings, deployments ranging from 1 PB to 100+ PB across dozens of enterprise customers

## Competitive Advantages
- **Entropy-aware compression**: Delivers state-of-the-art compression ratios (45–80% byte reduction) that are continuously adaptive to query patterns and data drift, unlike static compression schemes.
- **Zero disruption deployment**: Operates inside the customer's VPC with no code changes, no downtime, and day-zero activation — dashboards show savings before "coffee cools."
- **Research moat**: Foundational research published at NeurIPS 2024 (weighted empirical risk minimization with surrogate data) and ongoing work on statistical theory of data selection under weak supervision. Chief Scientist Andrea Montanari (Stanford) leads the research agenda.
- **Dual value proposition**: Simultaneously reduces storage costs (pennies per GB) and accelerates query latency (petabytes queried like terabytes), while also optimizing LLM token utilization by up to 50%.

## Strategic Focus
- **Near-term**: Scale Crunch adoption across enterprise data lakes, with a focus on Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery ecosystems.
- **Medium-term**: Expand from compression into advanced subsampling and safe synthetic data generation, turning any lake into a "self-optimizing data factory."
- **Long-term**: Build Large Tabular Models that enable real-time reasoning over exabyte-scale data without scanning cold blocks — replacing traditional warehouse scans with inferred answers.

## Why Work Here
- **High-impact engineering culture**: 51% of the team is in technical roles, 18% in research — the company is deeply engineering-first and research-driven. Engineers work on foundational data systems for AI at petabyte scale.
- **Cutting-edge ML research**: Opportunity to work alongside a Chief Scientist from Stanford and publish at top venues (NeurIPS 2024). The company is advancing the state-of-the-art in data compression, subsampling, and synthetic data.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Headquarters in Mountain View, CA (287 Castro Street). Job postings indicate Mountain View is onsite. Also has offices in India (9 employees) and Austria (1 employee).
- **Notable perks**: "Pays for itself" ROI philosophy — the product delivers measurable cost savings to customers. The company is well-funded ($45M Series A) with strong investor backing.
- **Team composition**: Small, high-leverage team (35 people) with alumni from Meta, Salesforce, Dremio, StackRox, UiPath, and Stanford. Alums go on to LangChain, Google, Rippling, Uber, and Temporal Technologies.
- **Active hiring**: 9 open positions including Senior Software Engineer (Foundational Data Systems), Engineering Manager, Research Scientist (Tabular & Structured ML), Staff Software Engineer, and Research Product Manager.

## Sources
1. [granica.ai](https://www.granica.ai/)
2. [granica.ai/about](https://www.granica.ai/about)
3. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/granica-ai)
4. [PitchBook](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/528930-82)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/granica)

## Other roles at Granica

- [Senior Software Engineer — Distributed Compute / Spark Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-distributed-compute-spark-systems-granica-bay-area-7k9r7jezn5t1) — Bay Area
- [Senior Software Engineer — Lakehouse Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-lakehouse-systems-granica-bay-area-4apk25mqqrb0) — Bay Area
- [Research Product Manager – AI Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/research-product-manager-ai-systems-granica-bay-area-dmfh4stjx4qb) — Bay Area
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Mountain View, onsite](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-mountain-view-onsite-granica-bay-area-v1mcbe10jx24) — Bay Area
- [Enterprise Account Executive — New York Metro, remote](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-new-york-metro-remote-granica-new-york-9qt45q7e6n7g) — New York, NY
- [Research Scientist – Diffusion Models](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-diffusion-models-granica-bay-area-g1gcawhdzsns) — Bay Area
- [Research Scientist – Large Tabular Models (LTMs)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-large-tabular-models-ltms-granica-bay-area-2qa1k66qnecd) — Bay Area
- [Head of Finance — Strategic Finance & Corporate Development](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-finance-strategic-finance-corporate-development-granica-bay-area-77nfgrymjsbe) — Bay Area
- [People Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-granica-bay-area-pt66p3r3ty66) — Bay Area
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-handoff-sao-paulo-xyrh0ahftpxa) — São Paulo, Brazil