Elevate

Compensation

Full Description

We’re looking for our first Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) hires — innovators who can combine data engineering, customer problem-solving, and a bit of salesmanship. This role sits in-between data engineering and software engineering and requires strong Python and SQL skills, combined with an AI-forward mentality leveraging the latest tools to help us scale efficiently. You’ll work directly with Elevate AI’s CEO (Scott Cara, ex-PE, Bain, HBS) to deliver world-class implementations for our customers: building AI-powered migration pipelines, standing up data warehouses, and automating workflows that make businesses run faster and smarter. This is a founding-level technical role with enormous ownership. You’ll write production code, talk to customers, scope new deals, and shape how Elevate AI scales. In your first 30 days, you’ll meet with customers and ship your first full data pipeline to production. This role will not involve significant time on front-end development or foundational model training. About Elevate AI Elevate AI uses AI to automate data integrations for roll-ups. We help acquisitive platforms clean, consolidate, and analyze their data across legacy systems (i.e., systems that come from acquisitions) and their core tech stack — enabling faster integrations, sharper reporting, and better decisions. Our initial customers are roll-ups. Often backed by private equity or venture capital funds, these companies are acquiring businesses fast - think: 5 to 50 (!) acquisitions per year. We help our customers bring order to the chaos, by migrating systems, unifying data, and powering AI automations in their business. This is a hair-on-fire problem and our customers love us for making their lives materially better. While we are sector agnostic, our initial customer base is largely in the services space, e.g., HVAC, pest control, environmental restoration, fire & life safety, accounting, RIAs. Over time, we will expand to many more sectors and data use cases beyond roll-ups. Since launching in the spring of 2025, we are already working with 5+ roll-ups with a deep pipeline of future customers that we want to onboard. With our unmatched networks and repeatable GTM motion, we have no shortage of prospective customers. Our bottleneck is building…which is why we need you! We’re a small, fast-moving team. The founders have known each other for 10+ years from their undergraduate CS majors at Duke University: CEO: Scott Cara (Duke + HBS, Bain & Co., Sycamore Partners) CTO: Steve Mazzari (Duke, Meta, Scratch, Mentaya) CPO: Jeffrey Day (Duke + UC Berkeley, P/E Investments, Circle) We are well-capitalized, having completed our latest fundraising round last month after presenting at the Y Combinator Demo Day in September 2025. The round was specifically intended to enable us to hire top-tier talent that will accelerate our already rapid growth. What You’ll Do Collaborate with customers to understand their systems (QuickBooks, Sage, Albi, PestPac, ServiceTitan, BuildOps, etc.) and translate business logic into data models Own customer deployments end-to-end, from initial scoping and data ingestion to pipeline delivery Build AI-powered data transformations (using Python dataframes and LLM APIs) to integrate, clean and enrich messy data Design and maintain data infrastructure, e.g., Snowflake, Mage, AWS S3/RDS, OpenAI APIs Prototype tools and AI agents that make both Elevate and our customers more efficient Support go-to-market, by joining sales calls, scoping implementations, and identifying expansion opportunities Influence product direction, including what to automate next, how to templatize migrations, how to scale delivery, and more The Elevate Culture Our company is built around three core values: 1. Bias to Action: Speed is a superpower. We’d rather ship something 80% right and learn from customers than debate it to 100% in theory. We document decisions, test ideas quickly, and value momentum over perfection. 2. Assume Good Intentions: We move fast and work across disciplines with founders, engineers, and customers in the same Slack threads. We assume everyone’s doing their best with the information they have, and we solve problems together, not through blame. We are all accountable for outcomes, not just our individual contributions. 3. Professional Development: Everyone is building the next version of themselves. Whether it’s mastering new AI tools or leading a customer project end-to-end, we care about making all of us better every day and commit the time to support each other. Who You Are 3+ years of experience as a data engineer, software engineer, or ML engineer, ideally in a customer-facing or consulting context Full-stack data fluency. You can ingest, clean, transform, and warehouse data end-to-end Comfortable with Python, SQL, AWS, and modern data tools (Snowflake, Mage/Airflow, etc.) Experience working with messy operational data (finance, CRM, ERP, etc.) across multiple systems Strong communication and business sense. You can talk to CFOs and CEOs, not just other engineers Comfortable in the chaos of early-stage startups: you’re scrappy, autonomous, and action-oriented Excited by AI and automation, and eager to experiment with LLMs to make data work smarter Bonus points if you’ve… Worked in or with private equity or roll-ups (or know what EBITDA stands for) Built internal data platforms or migration pipelines Dabbled with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Claude), in particular for data cleaning and enrichment Why This Role Is Different At Elevate AI, FDEs are the core of our model. You’ll directly report to the CEO, with freedom to own customer accounts, visibility into every part of the business, and the ability to define how we operate. This is the perfect role for someone who’s been the technical backbone of a data consulting firm or internal data team — and now wants to build. The role includes meaningful equity and competitive cash pay.