Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

deepset

1d•Remote

About The Position

deepset is hiring a Manager to lead its Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Customer Engineering. The role is responsible for building a healthy, high-trust team and ensuring it delivers deepset’s AI Platform into enterprise and public sector production environments on target and to a high standard. The manager should be close to the work and able to go deep when needed. The role includes developing team culture and careers across four FDE profiles—Advisory, Builder, Operating, and Support—and building hiring and onboarding for a remote-first, async-heavy team. It also owns delivery operations, including staffing engagements, meeting utilization targets, maintaining technical quality, delivering within scope and schedule, and resolving customer escalations. The manager partners with the Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope, feasibility, and staffing, and shares field insights with Product and Engineering to develop reusable patterns. deepset describes itself as a remote-first company building open and enterprise-grade AI tools, including Haystack and the Haystack Enterprise Platform.

Requirements

Experience leading customer-facing engineering, professional services, or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI, or infrastructure.
Strong coaching instincts and the ability to develop engineers and build high-trust teams.
Technical depth in RAG, including retrieval, embeddings, re-ranking, and evaluation; cloud and self-hosted deployments; model optimization; APIs; integrations; and IAM/security fundamentals.
Commercial awareness of how scope, staffing, and execution affect utilization, revenue, and margin.
Clear written and verbal communication with technical and executive audiences.
Comfort with ambiguity in a remote-first setup.

Nice To Haves

Experience running services or delivery inside a SaaS or platform company navigating the move to enterprise and self-hosted deployments.
Experience with OKR frameworks and squad-based delivery organizations.
Familiarity with agent-based systems, LLM platforms, and AI-native engineering tooling.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain team health and culture across the Advisory, Builder, Operating, and Support FDE profiles, encouraging open discussion and sharing of patterns.
Conduct 1:1s and career conversations to support engineers’ development.
Build the hiring and onboarding pipeline for a remote-first, async-heavy team.
Remove blockers quickly and escalate unresolved issues before they become delivery risks.
Assign the right FDE profile to each engagement and deliver against utilization targets while guarding against burnout and idle capacity.
Review architecture and solution decisions across RAG pipelines, retrieval quality, deployment topology, and production operations.
Deliver engagements within scope and on plan, follow delivery processes, and own resolution of customer escalations.
Partner with the Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope, feasibility, and staffing, with clear ownership at handoffs.
Feed customer and field insights to Product and Engineering and build reusable patterns that reduce custom work.