# Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

**Company:** [Replit](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/replit)
**Location:** Foster City, CA
**Role:** Solutions Architecture
**Salary:** $300k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Applied Ai, Infrastructure, Developer Tools, Production Systems, AI Agents, Llm Workflows, Enterprise Integrations, Technical Leadership
**Posted:** 2026-06-11

> Lead and scale a Forward Deployed Engineering team that embeds with strategic enterprise customers to build production AI-native systems, drive adoption, and feed learnings back into the Replit platform. Requires 12+ years of engineering leadership experience and deep technical judgment.

## Job Description

## 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

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