Forward Deployed Data Engineer
Posted 3 days ago
The role in short
Lead the design and delivery of internal AI-enabled data products and platforms, partnering with business units to drive adoption and operational efficiency.
Job Summary
Are you passionate about turning data and AI into real-world business impact?
At Insulet, this is an opportunity to be at the forefront of enterprise transformation, partnering directly with business leaders to design, build, and scale AI-powered data solutions that drive smarter decisions, accelerate innovation, and create measurable outcomes.
As a Forward Deployed Data Engineer, you will lead the delivery and adoption of cutting-edge data and AI products across the organization. You'll bridge the gap between complex business challenges and scalable, production-grade solutions, helping teams unlock greater speed, automation, reliability, and performance through modern data platforms and AI-enabled capabilities.
As a key member of the Enterprise AI & Data organization, you'll combine deep technical expertise with product thinking, architectural leadership, and strong business partnership. This role is ideal for a hands-on builder and strategic thinker who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys solving high-impact problems, and can guide initiatives from concept to enterprise-wide adoption.
You will play a pivotal role in transforming ideas into measurable business value, ensuring solutions are embedded into day-to-day operations, supported by trusted data, reusable architecture, strong governance, and modern engineering practices.
If you're energized by the opportunity to shape the future of AI and data at scale, drive visible business impact, and work alongside talented teams solving meaningful challenges, we'd love to connect with you.
The Forward Deployed Data Engineer will lead the design, delivery, and adoption of AI-enabled data engineering solutions across Insulet. This role will translate complex opportunities into scalable, production-grade data products that improve decision quality, speed, automation, reliability, and enterprise performance.
As part of the Enterprise AI and Data organization, this role requires deep data engineering expertise, AI-native development practices, product thinking, platform architecture, business partnership, and delivery leadership.
The ideal candidate will be a hands-on technical leader who can operate at both strategic and engineering levels. This leader will be accountable for moving data and AI use cases from ambiguous business need to measurable impact, ensuring solutions are embedded into operational workflows and supported by trusted data, reusable architecture, strong controls, and modern platforms.
Key Responsibilities
1. Forward Deployed Engineering and Business Partnership
- Collaborate with priority business, product, analytics, and AI teams to understand decisions, workflows, constraints, and value opportunities at the point of use.
- Translate ambiguous business challenges into data product charters, architecture hypotheses, rapid experiments, MVPs, and scalable delivery plans.
- Build thin vertical slices that connect source data to trusted decisions, then harden successful prototypes into secure, supportable, and reusable enterprise products.
- Partner with senior business and technology leaders to define outcomes, adoption measures, value cases, roadmaps, and delivery priorities.
- Act as the technical bridge across data owners, model builders, application engineers, platform teams, Security, Privacy, Quality, and Compliance to remove delivery friction.
2. AI-Native Data Product Development and Integration
- Design and deliver AI-ready data foundations for predictive models, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge systems, copilots, and autonomous or semi-autonomous agents.
- Use AI coding copilots and engineering agents to accelerate requirements discovery, data profiling, code generation, testing, documentation, lineage, migration, incident triage, and performance optimization.
- Create governed agentic workflows that can discover data, propose transformations, validate quality, monitor pipelines, and recommend remediation with explicit human review and approval controls.
- Engineer context layers that combine structured data, documents, metadata, semantic models, vector representations, and business rules so AI systems can reason from trusted enterprise knowledge.
- Lead multidisciplinary teams through the full data product lifecycle from discovery and architecture to production deployment, adoption, observability, and continuous improvement.
- Ensure data products and AI-enabled services are actionable and embedded into business applications, analytics experiences, operational processes, and decision workflows.
3. Modern Architecture, Trust, and Engineering Excellence
- Architect composable data products using domain-oriented ownership, clear interfaces, reusable services, data contracts, semantic standards, and lifecycle accountability.
- Design batch, streaming, event-driven, API-based, and change-data-capture patterns suited to the latency, scale, resilience, and decision needs of each use case.
- Build metadata-driven pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, environment promotion, and policy-as-code controls.
- Engineer data quality, lineage, security, privacy, access, retention, auditability, and regulatory requirements into products by design.
- Implement end-to-end observability for freshness, completeness, schema change, data drift, pipeline health, service levels, user impact, and cost.
- Apply cloud and AI FinOps practices to optimize compute, storage, data movement, model consumption, and engineering effort against measurable business value.
4. People Leadership and Enterprise Scale
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of Data Engineers and cross-functional delivery professionals while remaining close to architecture and implementation.
- Create reference architectures, starter kits, reusable components, engineering playbooks, and paved-road patterns that enable teams to deliver faster and more consistently.
- Lead design reviews, code reviews, technical spikes, and post-implementation learning sessions that raise engineering quality and accelerate knowledge transfer.
- Build communities of practice across data engineering, analytics engineering, AI engineering, architecture, and platform teams.
- Bring frontline delivery insights into enterprise platform priorities, standards, workforce capabilities, operating models, and investment decisions.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, data science, information systems, or a related technical field.
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, platform engineering, or data architecture, including leadership of complex enterprise delivery.
- Demonstrated ability to design, code, test, deploy, and operate cloud-scale data products using modern engineering practices.
- Strong experience with distributed data processing, data modeling, orchestration, APIs, event streaming, DevOps, DataOps, observability, and infrastructure as code.
- Practical understanding of generative AI, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, AI agents, model integration, and AI-assisted software development.
- Demonstrated ability to lead data products from discovery through MVP, production deployment, adoption, and continuous improvement.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in healthcare, medical devices, life sciences, diabetes care, digital health, or regulated industries.
- Experience with platforms such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka, dbt, Spark, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub, or similar enterprise technology ecosystems.
- Experience establishing data product operating models, data contracts, semantic layers, real-time architectures, or self-service engineering platforms.
- Experience modernizing legacy data estates and integrating ERP, CRM, manufacturing, supply chain, quality, commercial, clinical, or connected-device data.
- Familiarity with privacy, security, validation, responsible AI, auditability, and enterprise governance requirements for data and AI solutions.
NOTE: This position is eligible for hybrid working arrangements (requires on-site work from an Insulet office). #LI-Hybrid
Additional Information
Compensation & Benefits:
For U.S.-based positions only, the annual base salary range for this role is $143,700.00 - $215,550.00
This position may also be eligible for incentive compensation.
We offer a comprehensive benefits package, including:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Paid time off (PTO)
- And additional employee wellness programs
Application Details:
This job posting will remain open until the position is filled.
To apply, please visit the Insulet Careers site and submit your application online.
Actual pay depends on skills, experience, and education.
Insulet Corporation (NASDAQ: PODD), headquartered in Massachusetts, is an innovative medical device company dedicated to simplifying life for people with diabetes and other conditions through its Omnipod product platform. The Omnipod Insulin Management System provides a unique alternative to traditional insulin delivery methods. With its simple, wearable design, the tubeless disposable Pod provides up to three days of non-stop insulin delivery, without the need to see or handle a needle. Insulet’s flagship innovation, the Omnipod 5 Automated Insulin Delivery System, integrates with a continuous glucose monitor to manage blood sugar with no multiple daily injections, zero fingersticks, and can be controlled by a compatible personal smartphone in the U.S. or by the Omnipod 5 Controller. Insulet also leverages the unique design of its Pod by tailoring its Omnipod technology platform for the delivery of non-insulin subcutaneous drugs across other therapeutic areas. For more information, please visit insulet.com and omnipod.com.
We are looking for highly motivated, performance-driven individuals to be a part of our expanding team. We do this by hiring amazing people guided by shared values who exceed customer expectations. Our continued success depends on it!
At Insulet Corporation all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.
Prep for this interview
5 questions likely to come up at Insulet Corporation, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Experience with platforms such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka, dbt, Spark, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub, or similar enterprise technology ecosystems.”
How would you debug a deployment that works in staging but fails at the customer's site?
How to answer
Why they ask: Customer environments differ in ways you can't see. This tests method under pressure.
- Compare versions, config and environment variables
- Check network rules, proxies and certificates (common in enterprise)
- Look at resource limits and permissions
- Add the missing check to your install steps afterwards
Tip: List the usual suspects and how you'd check each without full access.
- 2Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Use AI coding copilots and engineering agents to accelerate requirements discovery, data profiling, code generation, testing, documentation, lineage, migration, incident triage, and performance optimization.”
A customer says “we want AI in our claims process.” What do you ask in the first meeting?
How to answer
Why they ask: Most FDE work starts this vague. They want to hear you find the real problem before you pick a tool.
- Map the current process: who touches a claim, in what order, with which systems
- Find the slowest or most error-prone step and ask what it costs them
- Agree on one measurable goal (for example time per claim, or error rate)
- Ask what data you can access, and who signs off on security
Tip: Ask about the work, not the technology. Who does it today, how long it takes, what a mistake costs, and how they'd know it got better.
- 3Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “2. AI-Native Data Product Development and Integration”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 4Data and SQL
They wrote: “Strong experience with distributed data processing, data modeling, orchestration, APIs, event streaming, DevOps, DataOps, observability, and infrastructure as code.”
The customer's data is spread across five systems that disagree. How do you get one clean view?
How to answer
Why they ask: Real deployments rarely have one source of truth. They want a practical approach, not a perfect one.
- List each system and what it's the best source for
- Pick matching keys and decide how to handle records that don't match
- Load into one place with clear rules, and keep the raw copies
- Show the customer the mismatches; they often fix the source
Tip: Name the system the business trusts most for each field, and get the customer to agree.
- 5LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Create governed agentic workflows that can discover data, propose transformations, validate quality, monitor pipelines, and recommend remediation with explicit human review and approval controls.”
How do you know an LLM feature is good enough to ship?
How to answer
Why they ask: Evals are what separate a demo from production. Many roles list them by name.
- Write 50–200 real examples with expected outcomes, with customer experts
- Agree on a pass bar and the errors that are never acceptable
- Score automatically where possible; review a sample by hand
- Re-run on every prompt or model change, and watch live traffic after launch
Tip: Describe a test set built with the customer, a pass bar agreed up front, and checks that run on every change.
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