Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

What You'll Do

• Lead the FDE team end-to-end: hire, coach, manage performance, and develop careers across the FDE track and toward FDR or GM.
• Own the supply side of FDE staffing: commit FDEs to the staffing cadence and match them to projects by skill and development need, balancing each FDE's preferred vertical with where the work is, and staffing to the phase of a project rather than parking people for its full length.
• Set and uphold the craft bar: sharp task scoping, sound pipeline and measurement design (including the LLM-as-judge and quality instrumentation that surface problems early), clear instruction writing, and compelling customer-facing presentation of findings.
• Protect FDE focus: keep day-to-day project operations with the SPLs and Pod Leads, and keep FDEs on scoping, technical depth, and what the customer needs from the data.
• Own FDE onboarding and the bar that certifies a new FDE as ready to be staffed: define which projects are eligible to onboard on, maintain the instruction and Loom repository, and run the onboarding program — including the core exercise (read a past project's instructions, explain them back, and write a new version in the repo).
• Drive reuse and leverage: build the templates, tooling, and playbooks that stop FDEs rebuilding pipelines and instructions from scratch each project, so the team's capacity compounds as we scale.
• Ensure FDEs work hand-in-glove with FDRs on research, efficacy, and customer needs, and partner with whoever owns quality sign-off so quality is caught in flight, not at delivery.
• Partner with the SPL Manager, Deployment Leads, and GMs on staffing, delivery, and alignment with customer objectives.
• Step in on escalations when a pipeline, delivery, or customer relationship is at risk.
• Maintain a clear, live view of team capacity, utilization, and bench across active projects.

What You'll Own

• The capability and craft bar of the FDE team.
• How quickly and consistently new FDEs reach a staffable standard.
• Healthy deployment — the right FDEs on the right projects, at the right altitude and utilization.
• A growing bench of FDEs developing toward FDR and future leadership.

What We're Looking For

• A strong forward-deployed / FDE background, or significant experience managing technical or delivery people — and readiness to be a hands-on, player-coach manager.
• Strong technical fluency in our domain: enough depth in frontier-data work, RL environments, data pipelines, and quality/evaluation to coach credibly on scoping, pipelines, judge design, and data quality.
• Excellent judgment on what makes data genuinely useful to a customer — how to translate ambiguous requirements into clear plans, and how to tell whether data will actually move a model.
• A track record of developing people and giving direct, useful feedback.
• A high bar for quality paired with the ability to deliver against ambitious timelines.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-scaling environments where the processes are still being built.
• The ability to manage multiple people and projects at once without losing attention to detail.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience with RLHF, reinforcement-learning environments, evaluation/benchmark work, or LLM-as-judge systems.
• Experience working with forward-deployed engineers, solutions engineers, or implementation teams.
• Experience building onboarding programs, instruction systems, or training content.
• Experience scaling a team and its operating processes in a high-growth environment.