Head of FDE

Foundr • San Francisco, CA

11d • Hybrid

About The Position

We're partnering with a high-growth, Series C AI company building next-generation products at the intersection of frontier machine learning and real-world enterprise deployment. Backed by top-tier investors and led by an experienced founding team, the company has strong commercial traction and is scaling rapidly across enterprise accounts. They're now looking to bring on a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead the function that turns cutting-edge AI capability into deployed, production-grade customer outcomes. This is a high-visibility leadership hire with direct access to the executive team, real commercial ownership, and the opportunity to define how the company lands, يبdeploys, and expands with its most strategic customers.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading forward deployed, solutions engineering, or technical delivery teams at a high-growth startup or modern tech company
• Strong hands-on engineering background, comfortable architecting and shipping production systems, ideally involving AI/ML, data pipelines, or complex enterprise integrations
• A track record of owning technical customer relationships at the enterprise level, including navigating security reviews, procurement, and senior stakeholders
• Experience building a function or team from an early stage, hiring, playbooks, processes, and culture
• Commercial instincts: you understand how technical delivery drives revenue, retention, and expansion
• Ability to operate with high ownership in fast-moving, ambiguous environments, balancing speed with reliability
• Excellent communication skills, equally credible with a customer's CTO, a founding team, and your own engineers

Nice To Haves

• Experience deploying LLM-based or AI/ML products into enterprise environments
• Background as an FDE or solutions architect at companies known for the model (e.g. Palantir-style forward deployment)
• Exposure to regulated or data-sensitive industries (financial services, healthcare, government, etc.)
• Experience scaling a delivery organization through Series B → D growth
• Prior founder or 0→1 product experience

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and scale the Forward Deployed Engineering team, hiring, onboarding, and developing top-tier engineers who thrive in ambiguous, customer-facing environments
• Own the technical delivery of enterprise deployments end-to-end, from scoping and solution design through integration, launch, and expansion
• Define the FDE operating model: engagement playbooks, deployment methodology, staffing model, and success metrics
• Embed with strategic customers to understand their workflows, data, and constraints, then design and ship solutions on top of the company's AI platform
• Partner with Sales on technical pre-sales, proof-of-value engagements, and complex deal support to accelerate revenue
• Act as the primary feedback loop between the field and product/engineering, turning deployment learnings into roadmap priorities and platform improvements
• Establish delivery rigor: timelines, escalation paths, and quality standards that keep deployments fast without breaking things
• Work directly with founders and executive leadership on account strategy, expansion motions, and the commercial trajectory of key accounts

Benefits

• Own and scale a function that sits at the core of the company's growth engine
• Work directly with experienced founders, executive leadership, and top-tier investors
• High-impact leadership role at a company moving from strong traction to category leadership
• Shape how a frontier AI product gets deployed into the world's largest enterprises, from first principle

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed