Forward Deployed Architect (Hightouch, Remote: North America, Location-Independent Pay)

Run discovery with marketing and data teams to move from vague goals such as better targeting to specific activation use cases. Profile and understand customer data, with agents doing the first pass and you deciding what it means, then architect a solution that closes data gaps and lands a working Hightouch configuration. Create target-state schemas and identity matching rules that make customer data activation-ready, designing identity resolution at the person, household or device grain. Direct the build by putting agents to work profiling the warehouse, proposing models and generating transformations, reviewing and rewriting everything they produce and owning the resulting models and their performance. Define the metric that proves the engagement worked, agree it with the customer before the build, compute it and defend it to senior leaders. Hand off day-to-day work but remain the named architect for data model changes, new sources and identity graph rework, producing reusable reference architectures. Build the semantic layer, metric definitions and business logic that Hightouch agents run on. Surface product gaps to the product teams.

5 or more years in a customer-facing technical role such as analytics engineering, solutions architecture, forward-deployed engineering, data consulting or in-house marketing data work at a large brand. Fluent SQL in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, with query performance and warehouse cost as things you think about unprompted. Experience directing AI agents rather than just prompting them, and scrutinizing every line before it ships. A driver who has parachuted into messy engagements with many stakeholders and driven discovery, clarity and alignment. Bonus: dbt, SQLMesh or similar transformation tooling with a git-native, PR-driven workflow; prior work with identity resolution, CDPs or MDM. Must be based in North America.