Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

UiPath•Bellevue, WA

21h•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will lead a senior team responsible for UiPath’s most strategic customer engagements and help define how the Forward Deployed Engineering function scales across the company. You will operate beyond the scope of individual delivery oversight, shaping the technical, organizational, and customer operating model for complex AI and automation programs. This role requires a combination of organizational leadership, deep technical fluency, executive customer engagement, and cross-functional influence. You will be accountable not only for the success of the engagements your team leads, but also for the broader systems that make those engagements successful, including talent quality, portfolio health, delivery standards, executive stakeholder alignment, reusable technical patterns, and the translation of field insight into product and company action. You will serve as both a people leader and a senior technical and business leader, helping UiPath deliver transformative outcomes for strategic customers while strengthening the long-term capabilities of the FDE organization.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering and technical leadership experience, with a strong record of building and scaling customer-facing engineering functions in enterprise software
Deep expertise in LLM systems and AI application architecture, including prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and large-scale deployment of agentic workflows
Strong technical fluency in Python and/or TypeScript, with the ability to guide architecture and execution for production-grade AI systems
Proven track record of setting organizational technical strategy and leading complex, cross-functional initiatives that deliver measurable customer and business impact
Strong leadership in building, mentoring, and scaling high-performing technical teams and leaders
Track record of driving organizational excellence through technical standards, delivery frameworks, and repeatable best practices across teams
Willingness to travel to customer sites (up to 30–40%) and engage directly with strategic customers and partners

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise automation platforms.
Background in machine learning, including experience with custom ML models, document understanding, or enterprise AI platform deployments
Familiarity with multiple LLM providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and others, with a strong understanding of strategic model tradeoffs and enterprise adoption considerations
Experience with orchestration platforms, workflow engines, and large-scale integration architectures
Track record of shaping technical strategy for customer implementations and scaling repeatable delivery patterns across teams or regions
Experience building cross-functional partnerships across product, engineering, sales, and customer success to accelerate enterprise AI adoption
Prior experience overseeing customer use case implementations in enterprise software at scale

Responsibilities

Recruit, hire, and retain top-tier Forward Deployed Engineering talent, building a team with the technical depth and customer acumen required for strategic engagements.
Develop Principal and Sr. Principal FDEs through coaching, career planning, and targeted stretch opportunities that prepare them for technical and leadership progression.
Set clear performance expectations, deliver candid feedback, and manage performance issues with fairness and rigor.
Foster a team culture that values technical excellence, customer empathy, rapid learning, and collaborative problem-solving.
Create development paths that accommodate both individual contributors and management tracks, ensuring the team retains its strongest technical talent.
Define the technical and operational strategy for Forward Deployed Engineering across UiPath’s most strategic customer programs, shaping how the organization delivers enterprise AI and agentic automation at scale.
Synthesize field signals across engagements into roadmap, platform, and investment priorities, and establish the reference architectures, governance models, and delivery standards that define how FDE teams build reusable, enterprise-ready AI solutions.
Lead organizational standards for agent engineering, prompt operations, evaluation frameworks, LLM governance, and production deployment practices, while determining where the function should invest in emerging technologies and ecosystem capabilities.
Set the bar for performance optimization, cost discipline, security posture, and reliability across customer implementations, ensuring the FDE organization delivers consistent, high-quality outcomes in production.
Define the technical and organizational standards that shape how Forward Deployed Engineering delivers AI and agentic automation across UiPath’s most strategic engagements.
Drive cross-functional initiatives that improve scalability, consistency, and execution quality across teams, and translate customer insight, field patterns, and market signals into technical direction, co-innovation priorities, and product influence.
Establish durable mechanisms to spread best practices and institutionalize learning across the function, while representing UiPath’s forward-deployed engineering approach to senior customers, industry audiences, and internal leadership.
Define the strategic direction for customer and business impact across the FDE organization, ensuring the most important engagements advance UiPath’s long-term growth, differentiation, and market leadership.
Sponsor transformative lighthouse partnerships that showcase category-defining agentic outcomes and create reusable models for global field execution.
Shape company strategy by converting broad customer signals and market patterns into product, platform, and investment priorities.
Build and deepen executive relationships with senior customer stakeholders, positioning UiPath as a strategic partner in enterprise AI and automation transformation.
Institutionalize how business value is measured, communicated, and amplified across the customer lifecycle.
Elevate collaboration and leadership across the FDE organization, aligning teams, functions, and regions around the highest-impact customer and business priorities.
Create strong operating partnerships with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success so that field perspective consistently shapes company decisions and execution.
Build leadership depth by developing senior technical leaders into broader organizational influencers.
Define and reinforce the standards, rhythms, and decision frameworks that create consistency across the FDE organization.