The opportunity
Lead Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) are the most senior technical leaders in the FDE organization. They own the overall technical strategy for the FDE domain, not just individual engagements, and are accountable for how the entire function operates, scales, and improves over time.
What you'll do
Own the FDE organization's overall engagement strategy, serving as the: primary technical escalation point across the portfolio for the highest-risk, highest-visibility, and most 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 the technical architecture standards and design principles that govern: how the FDE domain builds customer-facing solutions and platform capabilities, turning organization-level ambiguity into coherent multi-quarter technical strategy
Stay hands-on where it matters most, writing and reviewing code and: personally unblocking the hardest technical failures to keep the organization's technical bar grounded in reality
Own the translation of field-wide patterns into the FDE domain's long-term: technical vision, representing that vision to Product and Engineering executive leadership and defending multi-quarter roadmap tradeoffs
Own the technical growth and career development of FDEs through mentorship,: coaching, and calibration of the org's technical bar, and play a lead role in hiring and leveling decisions
What they're looking for
- + years of relevant engineering experience, including a demonstrated track: record of hands-on technical leadership in production systems and complex enterprise environments
- Demonstrated success setting technical strategy and direction at an: organizational level, shaping how an entire function operates rather than leading initiatives within a single team
- Proven experience designing and directing production-grade integrations,: platforms, or distributed systems across multiple concurrent engagements or teams
- Excellent technical judgment under high ambiguity, with a track record of: making and being accountable for organization-level tradeoffs between customer impact, speed, maintainability, and risk
- Demonstrated ability to influence and align VP/executive-level stakeholders,: internally and at customer organizations, on strategic technical direction
- Track record of developing senior and staff-level engineers through: mentorship, coaching, and technical calibration, with willingness to travel up to 30% for executive engagements and technical reviews
- Preferred: experience setting technical strategy for LLM, agent framework,: retrieval, evaluation, or production AI systems at an organizational level, prior experience as a Staff-level FDE, and experience contributing to hiring bar-raising or leveling frameworks at organizational scale
