# Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

**Company:** [MongoDB](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/mongodb)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Solutions Architecture
**Salary:** $137k – $270k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** LLMs, Agent Frameworks, retrieval, evaluation, production ai, Distributed Systems, System Architecture, Integrations, Platform Engineering, technical strategy
**Posted:** 2026-08-12

> Leads technical strategy, architecture standards, escalations, and people development across the Forward Deployed Engineering organization. Requires 10+ years of engineering experience, organizational-level technical leadership, production systems expertise, and executive stakeholder influence.

## Job Description

## 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.

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