Forward Deployed Engineering Lead

Enterpret•New York, NY

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

Our Forward Deployed Engineering team builds exactly what a customer needs on top of the Enterpret platform, at the speed the deal or renewal demands. A custom solution, a product extension, a new capability. Every engagement has a named customer, a named outcome, and an end date. A win counts when the customer uses what we built and keeps using it. What proves general graduates into the product through the owning teams, so every engagement makes the platform stronger. This role exists because the team needs a hands-on lead in the field. Our customers are in the US, our FDE engineers are in Bengaluru, and the gap between them is where outcomes stall today. You will be the first FDE Lead, reporting into engineering leadership. You own two things: the outcomes FDE commits to customers, and the team that delivers them. This is a building role. You will write code, design solutions in customer offices, and lead the team from the front. We are not hiring a pure people manager.

Requirements

You have built solutions directly inside customer environments and carried them to adoption, as a forward deployed engineer, a founding engineer close to customers, or a solutions engineer who ships real code.
Breadth over specialization. You pick up an unfamiliar part of a product quickly, and you can design and defend a solution on the fly in a room full of customer engineers. You are as comfortable in an executive conversation as you are deep in the codebase, in the same afternoon.
You have led a small team while still building, and your team shipped faster because of how you ran it, not just what you coded.
You read what sits behind a customer ask, say no to builds that will not survive, and set expectations without burning the relationship.
You are comfortable being on the road. Embeds run from a few days to a few weeks, sometimes on short notice. Expect roughly 30% of your time at customer sites.
Comfort operating AI-first. Our default is that not using AI for a task is the choice that needs explaining.

Responsibilities

Deliver customer outcomes. Go deep with a few customers at a time. Understand the real problem behind the ask, take the build call with product, and ship the solution yourself: connectors, ingestion integrations, context-graph capabilities, agent workflows.
Build onsite. Travel to customer offices and stay days to weeks. Collect requirements on day one, build in the room, and leave with the outcome shipped and adopted. Every trip has a solutioning agenda and a named outcome before you book travel.
Run the team. Manage the FDE engineers in Bengaluru. Own intake, prioritization, onsite nominations, and handoffs. Be the bridge between US customers and the India team, so context flows both ways every day.
Work the seams. Partner with sales engineering on POCs and customer success on renewals. Set expectations with customers directly, and push back on requirements that lead to unsustainable builds. Hand off finished builds to product teams through a single sign-off review.
Hold the bar. FDE holds the same bar as product engineering. Raise the team's product breadth until every engineer can answer for the whole product in front of a customer.