Lead Forward Deployed Engineer
Core
Senior technical leader owning the overall strategy, architecture, and scaling of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) organization, acting as the primary escalation point for high-risk, ambiguous situations across multiple concurrent engagements.
Role type
Principal/Staff-level technical leader (FDE organization head)
Builds
Customer-facing solutions, platform capabilities, and the long-term technical vision for the FDE domain
Domain
Enterprise software, distributed systems, AI/LLM systems
Deliverable
production ML models | product features | infrastructure
Required skills
Technical strategy at organizational level, hands-on coding and unblocking complex failures, designing production-grade integrations and distributed systems, influencing VP/executive stakeholders, mentoring Staff-level engineers, making tradeoffs under high ambiguity
Preferred skills
Organizational-level strategy for LLM, agent frameworks, retrieval, evaluation, or production AI systems, prior Staff-level FDE experience, experience building hiring/leveling frameworks
Technologies
LLM, agent frameworks, retrieval, evaluation, distributed systems
Responsibilities
Own the FDE organization's overall engagement strategy and technical architecture standards; Act as the trusted technical counterpart to customer executives and internal VPs; Stay hands-on writing code and unblocking hardest technical failures; Translate field-wide patterns into long-term technical vision; Own the technical growth and career development of FDEs through mentorship and hiring; Serve as the final point of technical judgment for deadlocks
Seniority
Principal/Staff, hands-on IC with organizational leadership