Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Beacon Software • Toronto, ON

13d

About The Position

Beacon is an AI transformation company. We own vertical market software businesses and we are rebuilding how they run and grow on one AI-native operating platform. Forward Deployed Engineers are where that platform meets reality. FDEs sit inside the pods with the vertical's product leader, own the customer, land the platform in real portco workflows, and carry each company's problems back to it. This is where our scarcest capacity is spent. We are hiring the leader who owns this function: the people, the doctrine, the allocation of capacity across pods, and the one number the model lives or dies on, labor per portco falling every quarter while the next deployment in a vertical gets faster than the last.

Requirements

• Built and led a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineering function at a company where the product was an AI or data platform.
• Managed the transition from an individual goal-setting environment to a team with a shared backlog and standard, while retaining team members.
• Strong generalist engineering skills, comfortable working in unfamiliar codebases within a day.
• Experience shipping LLM-native software in production, including implementing evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking.
• Ability to review an FDE's deployment plan (wedge) and assess its potential for compounding value.
• Operator instincts, including understanding P&L, prioritizing business outcomes (e.g., churn-save over feature launch), and negotiating deployments with EBITDA-driven stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to allocate scarce resources ruthlessly and communicate these decisions clearly and professionally, even when delivering difficult news.
• Proficiency in clear writing and transparent work practices, including asynchronous communication, public channels, and documented decisions.
• Experience with wedge memos, GM updates, and post-deployment retrospectives as key work artifacts.

Nice To Haves

• Palantir-style FDE background
• Private equity or holdco operating exposure
• Experience within vertical SaaS
• Experience migrating a portfolio of legacy stacks onto shared infrastructure (rails)

Responsibilities

• Define and own the doctrine for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), ensuring each engagement is scoped as a wedge with a written start, end, and deliverable. Every deployment must contribute a primitive, a playbook, or an agent workflow to the platform, and leave the portco's own engineers more capable.
• Manage capacity allocation across pods, deciding with pod product leaders where approximately 1,000 engineering weeks per year will be directed, focusing on anchors, time-boxed bets, and instrumentation on cash engines.
• Establish and maintain the pod partnership, ensuring each vertical has a prioritized backlog co-owned by the pod product leader and the FDE, balancing opportunity size and go-to-market timing with technical sequencing and platform contributions.
• Act as the intake for patterns from the field and provide strong input on platform needs, driving the creation of shared primitives and workflows based on recurring code or impactful operational changes.
• Hire and grow senior generalist FDEs in Toronto and SF, holding the team and oneself to a high standard of upleveling others.
• Serve as a player-coach, carrying one hard deployment yourself in the first two quarters, demonstrating leadership through shipping.

What This Job Offers

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