Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

The Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) bridges customers, delivery teams, Product, and Platform Engineering. This hands‑on leadership role scales the design, deployment, and operation of agentic systems, building a repeatable delivery model that leverages reusable patterns and platform capabilities.

Key responsibilities

• Recruit, onboard, mentor, and manage a high‑performing FDE team.
• Create playbooks, reference architectures, onboarding processes, and escalation paths.
• Define and enforce technical quality, documentation, observability, and production‑readiness standards.
• Stay technically active, stepping into complex or strategic deployments as needed.
• Set standards for agentic workflows, including orchestration, memory, retrieval, tool use, guardrails, and evaluation.
• Maintain clear separation between reasoning components and execution components (APIs, tools, connectors).
• Run architecture reviews and deployment‑readiness checks.
• Translate field learnings into reusable primitives, templates, tooling, and platform enhancements.
• Develop operating models and technical standards for external implementation partners.

Required profile

• Proven leadership experience in engineering teams delivering complex software solutions.
• Strong customer‑facing skills with a track record of strategic engagements from discovery to production rollout.
• Ability to balance hands‑on technical work with high‑level architectural oversight.
• Experience building scalable delivery frameworks and partner ecosystems.

Required skills