Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Overview

Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) will build and scale a founding Forward Deployed Engineering team that embeds with strategic enterprise customers to ship production AI applications.

What you'll do

• Hire, develop, and retain Forward Deployed Engineers.
• Set technical and operational standards for customer engagements.
• Run regular 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and support career growth.
• Staff and oversee customer engagements, allocating resources across customer needs and team development.
• Review technical architectures and code to ensure production-ready quality.
• Create repeatable playbooks, starter repositories, integration templates, and an internal knowledge base.
• Define team OKRs and operational cadences to keep the team aligned and focused on outcomes.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or a technical customer-facing role.
• 2+ years of people management experience in a services/post-sales/FDE organization.
• Experience building organizations from 0->1 (not only inheriting an existing one).
• Experience working with enterprise customers on technical implementations.
• Ability to move between executive stakeholder conversations and hands-on debugging.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Excitement about building something new and defining what great looks like for a team that doesn't yet exist.

Details

• Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%), particularly during engagement kickoffs and for highest-priority accounts.
• Location-based hybrid policy: expected to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time.