Full-Time
Principal Field Engineer
Posted on 2/25/2026
Materialize
51-200 employees
Real-time cloud data warehouse for analytics
Compensation Overview
$200k - $220k/yr
Seattle, WA, USA + 2 more
More locations: California, USA | New York, NY, USA
Hybrid
NYC hybrid: minimum 3 days in HQ/week; West Coast candidates may work fully remote.
 Sales & Solution Engineering (2) |
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- 10+ years of experience in senior technical pre-sales, field engineering, solutions architecture, technical account management, forward-deployed engineering, or technical consulting roles
- Proven success leading complex enterprise evaluations and executive-level technical conversations with Fortune 500 engineering organizations
- Deep expertise in modern data architectures, including distributed systems, stream processing (Kafka, Flink), CDC pipelines, relational databases, and real-time data infrastructure
- Expert-level SQL skills and strong architectural judgment
- Demonstrated track record of building repeatable processes, frameworks, or tools adopted by others — not just individual heroics
- Entrepreneurial ownership mentality: you build process, you don't wait for it
- Ability to balance enterprise rigor with the pragmatism required in a fast-growing startup
- Own technical strategy for Materialize's most strategic and high-impact accounts, serving as the principal technical point of contact for Fortune 500 engineering teams
- Partner with Account Executives on must-win and highly competitive deals
- Lead executive-level technical discussions with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and enterprise architects
- Navigate complex enterprise evaluation processes, including security reviews and multi-stakeholder decision-making
- Design and oversee enterprise-grade proofs of value with clear technical and business success criteria
- Lead architectural discovery and deliver prescriptive recommendations, not just answers
- Deploy as a forward-deployed engineer on design partnerships and strategic logo acquisition, embedding with customer engineering teams to design and validate solutions
- Serve as the escalation point for complex or high-risk technical evaluations
- Identify and drive expansion opportunities across teams and business units within accounts
- Serve as the named Technical Account Manager for customers purchasing TAM services, leading quarterly business reviews and strategic account reviews focused on business outcomes and platform adoption
- Proactively monitor account health, identify and mitigate adoption or technical risks, and coordinate escalations across Product, Engineering, and Support when issues arise
- Identify high-leverage opportunities to automate field engineering workflows using artificial intelligence, and build and ship AI-powered agents and tools using large language models, machine learning platforms, and Materialize's own platform
- Translate customer feedback into actionable product and roadmap input
- Partner cross-functionally with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to improve go-to-market execution
- Define and codify technical methodologies, proof-of-value frameworks, discovery templates, and competitive positioning guides
- Build scalable assets and accelerators that improve team efficiency and consistency
- Mentor and coach Field Engineers through deal reviews, shadowing, and structured feedback
- Experience building AI agents or large language model-powered tooling is a plus
- Experience at a data infrastructure startup (Series A–D) is a plus
Materialize provides a cloud-based operational data warehouse that delivers real-time, sub-second data updates to support immediate decision-making across business operations. It processes data with a streaming engine built on Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow, offering real-time analytics with strong consistency and an interactive SQL-like interface so teams can both analyze and act on data. Unlike traditional warehouses that rely on batch updates, Materialize targets minute-by-minute and even second-by-second changes to drive automation, alerts, and real-time features in user-facing apps, customer data platforms, and machine learning pipelines. Its goal is to help businesses operate with up-to-the-current data, enabling faster personalization, dynamic pricing, and instant reactions to changing conditions.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series C
Total Funding
$100.5M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2019
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Customers in logistics, marketing tech, finance use for real-time visualization and modeling.
- Launched distributed streaming database in 2022 with storage-compute separation and scalability.
- Open beta of Materialize Cloud on September 13, 2021, simplifies real-time data adoption.
What critics are saying
- Tinybird erodes market share in 6-12 months with lower complexity for dashboards.
- SingleStore poaches finance clients in 9-15 months at 40% lower compute costs.
- Apache Flink 3.2 release in February 2026 replaces 90% features, slashing revenue.
What makes Materialize unique
- Materialize delivers strict serializability for streaming SQL queries on Kafka and PostgreSQL CDC.
- Incremental view maintenance handles arbitrary inserts, updates, deletes with sub-second latency.
- SQL optimizer performs subquery decorrelation and supports all aggregations like min, max, count.
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Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 0%1 year growth
↓ -2%2 year growth
↓ -3%LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At Kafka Summit London, Redpanda announced the availability of Redpanda Serverless, a fully managed, pay-as-you-go edition of its powerful, cost-effective streaming data platform. Redpanda Serverless empowers developers to get started with streaming data in seconds and to automatically scale the service up or down to match their data workloads. As with all Redpanda products, Redpanda Serverless is fully Apache Kafka® API-compatible, ensuring it works with the complete Kafka ecosystem without requiring changes to application code. “The magic of Redpanda Serverless is its ability to create a globally available cluster in the blink of an eye,” said Redpanda CEO and founder Alex Gallego. “Engineered from the ground up for massive multi-tenancy, speed and performance, Redpanda Serverless is the most cost effective and simplest way to get started with streaming, whether you are a solo dev just getting started or an expert at a large enterprise looking to absorb spikes and scale to zero during downtime.”. With Redpanda Serverless, developers will be able to tap into the Redpanda streaming data ecosystem to build new real-time applications
Head over to our on-demand library to view sessions from VB Transform 2023. Register Here. Data streaming major Confluent has launched a ‘Connect with Confluent’ partner program to help technology providers like Google BigQuery and MongoDB enable faster access to real-time data streams through their products.The initiative will enable vendors to bring fully managed data streams directly to their customers through native integrations with Confluent Cloud. It also provides partners with access to technical, sales and marketing support to amplify go-to-market efforts and ensure their customers can make the most of real-time data at every stage and unlock new experiences for end users.“When companies can harness streams of real-time data from previously siloed teams and applications across their business, it creates a powerful network effect that opens new avenues for growth and innovation,” Erica Schultz, president of field operations at Confluent, said in a press statement. “As technology partners bring Confluent data streams directly into their platforms, they unlock potential for more cutting edge, real-time applications to be developed on their platform.” How will Connect with Confluent help?Enterprises are bullish on real-time data, with 89% of technology leaders saying investments in data streaming are important, while 44% cite the technology as a top strategic priority for their business. Even IDC predicts that nearly 30% of data generated by 2025 will be real-time
Materialize Inc. has introduced new capabilities for its namesake streaming database, which makes it easier to build applications that process data in real time.
Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here. New York-based Materialize today announced the early availability of the next generation of its distributed streaming database to help enterprises mobilize their real-time streaming data with SQL
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Materialize today announced early availability of its distributed streaming database, which enables immediate, widespread adoption of real-time data for applications, business functions, and other data products. In an industry first for streaming data, Materialize delivers in a single platform the separation of storage and compute, strict-serializability, active replication, horizontal scalability and workload isolation — all through a simple SQL interface available as a fully-managed cloud service. Materialize is now the fastest way to build products with streaming data, drastically reducing the time, expertise, cost and maintenance traditionally associated with implementation of real-time features. Until now, adopting real-time data has come with sky-high development costs and extreme complexity in implementation, yet still lacks the capabilities necessary to truly productionalize the resulting data products. However, working with streaming data is no longer a nice-to-have for high-performing companies, and in the next decade, companies will have to work with a real-time first approach to their data. Materialize, for the first time, gives users all the power of streaming data with the same simplicity and low implementation cost as batch cloud data warehouses