Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Responsibilities

Build and lead the FDE organization

• Hire and develop a high-talent-density team of Forward Deployed Engineers
• Define the hiring bar, operating principles, and execution standards for the organization
• Build a team culture centered around speed, ownership, pragmatism, and customer impact
• Create systems and tooling that allow the team to scale without becoming process-heavy

Work directly with strategic customers

• Partner with engineering leaders, product teams, and executives at some of Replit’s largest enterprise customers
• Help customers redesign workflows around AI-native software development
• Lead complex technical engagements involving integrations, infrastructure, agents, automation, and internal developer platforms
• Unblock high-stakes deployments and help customers move from experimentation to production adoption

Build production systems

• Lead teams building real applications and workflows directly inside customer environments
• Drive rapid prototyping and iteration cycles with customers
• Jump into architecture reviews, debugging sessions, implementation strategy, or live builds when needed

Influence product and platform direction

• Identify repeatable customer implementation patterns and turn them into reusable platform capabilities
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to upstream learnings from customer deployments into the core platform
• Contribute production-ready code, tooling, integrations, and reference architectures that improve enterprise adoption at scale
• Create tight feedback loops between customer environments and Replit’s internal product development teams

Drive business impact

• Partner closely with Sales, Field Engineering, and Product on strategic accounts
• Improve customer adoption, expansion, retention, and deployment velocity
• Act as an executive escalation point for critical customer situations
• Help define how Replit scales enterprise adoption globally

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in engineering, infrastructure, developer tools, applied AI, or customer engineering environments
• Experience leading Forward Deployed Engineering, Applied AI, Solutions Architecture, or Strategic Engineering teams
• Deep curiosity around AI-native software development and strong instincts for how AI changes engineering workflows
• Experience leading high-performing technical organizations
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to operate credibly with senior engineers and executives
• Experience building and shipping production systems in fast-moving environments
• Strong product instincts and systems thinking
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal process
• Excellent communication and customer leadership skills
• Strong sense of ownership and urgency

Nice to have

• Experience with AI agents, LLM workflows, or developer tooling platforms
• Experience supporting Fortune 500 engineering organizations
• Startup or founder experience
• Experience working closely with Product organizations to shape roadmap direction