Forward Deployed Engineering Lead

Gradial•Seattle, WA

3d•$180,000 - $235,000

About The Position

As Forward Deployed Engineering Lead at Gradial, you will lead a team deploying our platform in complex enterprise environments. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can manage engineers, drive delivery, and go deep technically when needed. You will sit at the intersection of customer complexity, product insight, and execution quality, helping the team deliver exceptional outcomes while shaping how Gradial scales in the field. You’ll own strategic deployments across Gradial’s platform, lead custom projects for key enterprise customers, and support rollout of new capabilities in real-world environments. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, Forward Deployed Product Managers, and GTM to solve hard problems quickly, turn field learnings into product leverage, and ensure our most important customer work is executed with speed, rigor, and sound judgment. This role is for a leader who has strong technical instincts, knows how to push hard for customers without creating internal chaos, and can raise the bar for a team working at the edge of product and deployment.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in software engineering, technical delivery, solutions engineering, forward deployed work, or similar customer-facing technical roles
Experience directly managing technical teams in fast-moving, high-accountability environments
Strong technical fluency and the ability to stay hands-on with implementation and problem-solving
Proven success delivering complex work for enterprise customers in ambiguous, evolving environments
Strong cross-functional leadership skills across Engineering, Product, GTM, and customer stakeholders
Excellent customer-facing communication and the ability to build trust with technical and non-technical audiences
High autonomy, strong judgment, and a bias for action
Experience improving team operations, delivery rigor, and execution quality at scale
Comfort operating across a full platform surface area, including custom projects, enterprise rollouts, and highly visible customer work
Strong AI tooling experience and fluency with modern AI-native workflows, products, or implementation patterns

Nice To Haves

Experience in enterprise SaaS delivery, technical consulting, or systems integrator environments
Experience in MarTech, CMS, DAM, content operations, digital experience, or workflow-heavy enterprise environments
Familiarity with deploying AI-powered workflows into production customer environments and turning bespoke work into reusable product leverage

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, setting a high bar for execution, judgment, and ownership
Own delivery across strategic enterprise deployments, custom implementations, and new feature rollouts
Stay hands-on in solution design, scoping, architecture, debugging, and implementation when needed
Partner with Engineering and Forward Deployed Product Managers to turn customer complexity into scalable systems, product improvements, and repeatable delivery patterns
Work directly with enterprise stakeholders to clarify requirements, navigate ambiguity, unblock decisions, and drive outcomes
Improve team operations across planning, prioritization, communication, and delivery quality without slowing pace
Collaborate with GTM on strategic accounts to shape solutions that are technically credible and commercially effective
Identify patterns across customer work and turn them into playbooks, reusable components, and stronger execution models
Help the team balance speed and quality in high-stakes environments with evolving requirements
Act as a force multiplier across customers, product, and engineering by bringing clarity to messy problems and momentum to critical work