Sr. Sustaining and Forward Deployed Engineer

Abacus Insights is hiring a senior engineer to own production operations, incident response, and post-launch reliability across its healthcare data platform. The role combines customer-facing technical support and deployments with AWS and Databricks troubleshooting, software development, automation, and reliability improvements.

Responsibilities:

• 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:

• 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
• Experience in healthcare, health insurance, or regulated data environments
• Familiarity with:
  • Kubernetes (EKS), EMR, Lambda
  • Spark internals
  • Snowflake or similar data warehouses
• Experience with FHIR, MDM systems, or entity resolution
• Prior experience in SWAT, escalation engineering, or tiger-team roles
• Experience contributing to or operating within SRE/on-call programs