Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
About The Position
The role involves building the Forward Deployed Engineering function as a player/coach, maintaining close proximity to delivery to ensure high standards. The responsibilities include designing the operating model, playbooks, and the structure of human and agent pods. The role also entails hiring and developing engineers to execute the function. The position is remote-first, with travel requirements determined by each client, ranging from fully remote to approximately 25-50% on-site. The team operates with a philosophy of shipping with AI daily, living in the CLI, and maintaining high agency.
Requirements
- 8+ years shipping customer-facing outcomes under ambiguity
- Led multi-workstream deployments with executive stakeholders and real constraints (security, data, compliance, people)
- Built and maintained delivery standards (runbooks, acceptance criteria, evals)
- Hired and developed high-performing teams, and made the hard calls
- Comfortable in the CLI; you pair with AI agents as a default
- Translate fluently between business truth and technical execution
- Experience leading teams that are operator-first, AI-armed, and CLI-native. Experience leading pure-engineering or pure-consulting teams may not align with the role's requirements.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing an operating model from scratch: workflow maps, governance, leveling
- A point of view on where forward-deployed engineering is heading: Palantir pioneered it; OpenAI's Deployment Company, Anthropic's enterprise services firm, and Meta's enterprise unit are scaling it now
Responsibilities
- Own delivery outcomes across accounts: discovery → prototype → production → adoption
- Set the bar for "done" (evals, reliability, security, change management) and design every deployment to leave client teams able to run it
- Turn field learnings into repeatable playbooks, templates, and reference implementations
- Architect the pod model: how strategist, builders, and AI agents compose into a 90-day delivery unit
- Hire, level, and coach engineers through live deals and live deployments
- Drop into the hardest escalations and create forward motion
Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision coverage
- Professional-development budget
- Discretionary annual incentive
- Potential equity stake as part of the leadership team
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
