Forward Deployed Engineering Lead
Leads and builds a Forward Deployed Engineering team while personally delivering customer-facing AI solutions. Requires 12+ years across software engineering, architecture, and customer-facing engineering, plus technical leadership, full-stack development, and distributed-systems expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Build, recruit, develop, and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team in the assigned location.
- Remain hands-on by designing, prototyping, implementing, and shipping solutions alongside the team.
- Work directly with customers to understand workflows, needs, and complex technical problems.
- Own engagements end-to-end from ideation and architecture through shipping and iteration.
- Set technical standards through architecture decisions, code reviews, and hands-on engineering.
- Translate deployment insights into foundational product and platform improvements.
- Partner with other FDE leads to define standards, playbooks, and global scaling practices.
- Contribute to product strategy, technical decisions, and engineering culture.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience across software engineering, technical architecture, and customer-facing engineering.
- Experience leading and developing high-performing technical teams.
- Demonstrated ability to remain hands-on while leadership scope grows.
- Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals across modern frontend and backend development.
- Strong architectural thinking and familiarity with distributed systems.
- Experience owning complex technical engagements end-to-end.
- Exceptional product intuition and ability to work directly with users.
- Ability to code, make architectural decisions, lead engineers, and work with senior customer stakeholders.
- High agency and comfort in ambiguous, high-velocity environments.
Nice-to-haves
- Built a team or technical function from zero.
- Worked on agentic AI systems or built with large language models in production.
- Led zero-to-one product development.
- Experience in a founding or early-stage startup environment.
- Experience across high-growth startups, big tech, consulting, or enterprise AI.
Technology
- Frontend: React, TypeScript
- Backend: Golang, Rust
- Cloud: Cloudflare, Google Cloud, AWS
- Tooling: GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Terraform
Skills
React, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Cloudflare, GCP, AWS, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Terraform, Distributed Systems, LLMs, Agentic AI
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