Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

Customer and business impact

• Own the most complex customer engagements and technical workstreams, especially where the problem, solution, or path to production is ambiguous.
• Build deep understanding of customer architecture, business goals, constraints, and definition of success, and use that understanding to shape the technical approach rather than only execute within a predefined one.
• Act as a trusted technical counterpart to customer’s engineering leaders, internal product and engineering leaders, and executive stakeholders when navigating complex tradeoffs, risks, and priorities.

Technical leadership and execution

• Lead architectural design for customer-facing solutions and platform capabilities within the FDE domain, balancing hands-on implementation with technical decision-making across multiple teams.
• Take ambiguous, high-level problems and turn them into clear technical direction, implementation plans, milestones, and ownership boundaries that enable execution at quality and speed.
• Continue to write and review production-quality code, troubleshoot complex failures, and set a high bar for correctness, maintainability, observability, and operational readiness in the systems and integrations this role touches.
• Identify systemic issues in tooling, architecture, or delivery and drive durable fixes that improve outcomes across engagements rather than solving each issue as a one-off.

Product and roadmap influence

• Use field engagements to surface domain-level patterns, product gaps, and technical risks, and translate them into actionable proposals, design direction, and roadmap input.
• Influence short- to mid-term technical vision for the FDE domain, partnering with Product and Engineering leaders to balance customer impact, time-to-market, technical debt, and long-term platform quality.
• Help determine which field-learned patterns should remain engagement-specific and which should become reusable product capabilities, standards, or platform investments.

Cross-functional leadership

• Lead focused cross-functional workstreams with Product and Engineering, especially where field experience is necessary to define requirements, resolve tradeoffs, and deliver the right outcome.
• Drive consensus on large, abstract, or contentious technical issues that affect multiple teams, and resolve deadlocks through strong judgment, clear reasoning, and durable written artifacts.
• Create high-quality technical artifacts such as designs, decision logs, and proposals that align stakeholders and raise the standard for how teams communicate and execute.

Organizational impact

• Act as a force multiplier for the broader organization by mentoring senior engineers, sharing best practices across teams, and helping others make strong technical decisions in this domain.
• Establish or improve mechanisms, standards, and operating practices that help teams make high-quality decisions and deliver resilient solutions independently.
• Model MongoDB’s leadership principles through clarity, accountability, customer obsession, and strong cross-functional partnership in situations of high ambiguity and consequence.

Qualifications

Basic qualifications

• 9+ years of relevant engineering experience, including hands-on work in production systems and complex customer or enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated success leading technical domains or initiatives that span multiple teams, with ownership of technical direction and delivery outcomes.
• Strong experience designing and implementing production-grade integrations, platforms, or distributed systems in ambiguous environments.
• Strong technical judgment, including the ability to balance customer impact, speed, maintainability, and operational risk.
• Ability to shape technical direction based on customer and business context, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and raise the bar for other engineers through mentorship and technical leadership.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 30% to customer sites as needed for on-site engagements, technical reviews, and executive or customer presentations.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, or deploying AI systems in production enterprise environments.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed engineering role or a similarly hybrid role spanning customer environments, product influence, and hands-on engineering execution.
• Experience leading multi-team technical initiatives from problem definition through adoption, especially in environments with significant ambiguity or cross-functional dependency.