Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the FDE organization's overall engagement strategy and serve as the primary technical escalation point across the portfolio for high-risk, high-visibility, and ambiguous situations.
• Act as the trusted technical counterpart to customer executives and internal VP/executive stakeholders on strategic bets, major risks, and cross-portfolio tradeoffs.
• Set technical architecture standards and design principles for customer-facing solutions and platform capabilities, translating organization-level ambiguity into multi-quarter technical strategy.
• Stay hands-on by writing and reviewing code and personally unblocking difficult technical failures.
• Translate field-wide patterns into the FDE domain's long-term technical vision and represent that vision to Product and Engineering leadership.
• Own technical growth and career development through mentorship, coaching, hiring, and leveling decisions.
• Serve as the final point of technical judgment and represent the FDE function in executive and cross-organizational planning forums.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, including hands-on technical leadership in production systems and complex enterprise environments.
• Experience setting technical strategy and direction at an organizational level.
• Experience designing and directing production-grade integrations, platforms, or distributed systems across multiple engagements or teams.
• Excellent technical judgment under high ambiguity and accountability for organization-level tradeoffs involving customer impact, speed, maintainability, and risk.
• Ability to influence and align VP- and executive-level stakeholders internally and at customer organizations.
• Track record of developing senior and staff-level engineers through mentorship, coaching, and technical calibration.
• Willingness to travel up to 30% for executive engagements and technical reviews.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience setting organizational-level technical strategy for LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval, evaluation, or production AI systems.
• Prior experience as a Staff-level FDE.
• Experience contributing to hiring bar-raising or leveling frameworks at organizational scale.

Compensation and Benefits

• U.S. base salary range: $137,000–$270,000 USD.
• Additional benefits may include equity, employee stock purchase program, flexible paid time off, 20 weeks of fully paid gender-neutral parental leave, fertility and adoption assistance, a 401(k) plan, mental health counseling, transgender-inclusive health insurance coverage, and health benefits offerings.