Senior Sustaining and Forward Deployed Engineer

Abacus Insights

Senior Sustaining & Forward Deployed Engineer at Abacus Insights driving production operations and incident response. Collaborating with customers and teams to resolve technical challenges in AWS and Databricks environments.

Posted 7/6/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSDistributed SystemsPythonSpark

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Act as a senior technical escalation point during production incidents
Lead real-time incident triage, mitigation, and recovery efforts
Drive root cause analysis (RCA) with a focus on systemic, long-term fixes
Identify recurring failure patterns and push for architectural or operational improvements
Partner with Customer Success and Engineering to manage customer impact during incidents
Own post-launch reliability, stability, and operational quality of core systems
Investigate and resolve complex field issues and production defects
Ensure fixes developed during incidents or customer escalations are up streamed into the core product
Improve operational readiness of services through better runbooks, monitoring, and alerting
Reduce operational toil by converting repeated manual work into automation
Engage directly with strategic customers to solve real-world, production-grade technical challenges
Support complex deployments, integrations, and escalations in customer environments
Act as a trusted technical partner to customers during high-impact issues
Translate customer learnings into concrete product, platform, and operational improvements
Contribute to reusable tools, playbooks, and best practices that accelerate future deployments
Serve as a subject matter expert for AWS-hosted production systems
Troubleshoot and resolve issues across:
AWS compute, storage, networking, IAM, and security
Databricks jobs, clusters, and Spark-based data pipelines
Debug performance degradation, scalability issues, job failures, and data correctness problems
Partner with platform and data teams to harden systems for reliability, scale, and operability
Write production-quality code to:
Automate operational workflows
Improve reliability and observability
Eliminate manual intervention and reduce incident frequency
Contribute primarily in Python, with exposure to JVM-based systems as needed
Review code with a strong emphasis on operability, resiliency, and maintainability
Advocate for “build it so it can be operated” engineering standards
Provide technical leadership without formal authority, influencing design and operational decisions
Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and incident leadership
Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Customer teams
Operate effectively in high-pressure, ambiguous environments, especially during customer-impacting incidents

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, sustaining engineering, or production operations
Deep hands-on experience operating production systems in AWS
Strong experience troubleshooting Databricks and large-scale data platforms
Proficiency in Python and experience building production services or tooling
Strong understanding of:
Distributed systems
Incident management and RCA practices
Monitoring, alerting, and observability
CI/CD Pipelines that leverage Infrastructure as Code.
Proven ability to own problems end-to-end, from detection to permanent resolution
Excellent communication skills, especially during incidents and customer escalations
Ability to work backward from customer impact to root cause across systems and codebases, delivering fixes in environments with minimal documentation.
Strong instinct for operational risk, with the ability to proactively identify failure modes and harden systems before they impact customers.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Unlimited paid time off – recharge when you need it
Work from anywhere – flexibility to fit your life
Comprehensive health coverage – multiple plan options to choose from
Equity for every employee – share in our success
Growth-focused environment – your development matters here
Home office setup allowance – one-time support to get you started
Monthly cell phone allowance – stay connected with ease

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Production Systems OperationsRoot Cause AnalysisAutomation of Operational WorkflowsDistributed Systems UnderstandingCI/CD PipelinesMonitoring and AlertingObservability PracticesPerformance DebuggingScalability Issues ResolutionProduction-Quality Code Writing

Soft Skills

Excellent Communication SkillsTechnical LeadershipMentoring EngineersCollaboration with Cross-Functional TeamsAbility to Operate in High-Pressure Environments