Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Mesh•New York, NY

3d•$282,000 - $355,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Mesh is seeking an exceptional leader to establish and scale its Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, a new function within the company, starting with this role. The ideal candidate will lead a team of senior engineers who will embed with a select group of strategic partners, including exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets, to ensure the successful integration of Mesh's crypto payment solutions. This role requires a blend of technical expertise, commercial understanding, and leadership skills to build credibility with partners, scope integrations, and drive alignment. The FDE function is positioned within Engineering, focusing on shipping code that generalizes into the core platform, with time-boxed engagements and a commitment to keeping the function lean.

Requirements

10+ years in technical roles.
4+ years leading forward-deployed teams.
Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line within an existing company.
Proven track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers, including personally closing candidates.
Strong backend or integrations engineering background with the ability to read codebases, whiteboard systems, debug designs, and review architecture.
Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails.
History of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production.
Strong executive presence, effective with partner executives and internal leadership.
Client-facing instincts, ability to read a room, and separate stated asks from real constraints.
Willingness to push back on requests and drive alignment across engineering, revenue, and product.
Experience defining engagement models, scoping, and pricing for technical delivery work.

Nice To Haves

Resides in the New York City area or San Francisco.

Responsibilities

Build and scale the FDE organization.
Define the operating model for FDE, including engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar.
Hire 2-3 senior and staff-level generalist engineers within the year, placing them close to partner engineering teams and time zones.
Potentially lead the first FDE engagements to establish the playbook before scaling through the team.
Own delivery at Mesh's most strategic accounts, acting as the primary technical point of contact for partner executives.
Manage integration reviews, hold commitments, and convert technical discussions into signed plans.
Assign named engineers or small pods to specific accounts with mapped executive sponsors.
Own the qualification bar for FDE engagements, ensuring they are justified by integration bottlenecks, partner capacity, deal speed, or pattern generalization.
Establish clear boundaries with Customer Success (relationship ownership) and Support (break-fix).
Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production, rather than just tickets closed.
Shape product and platform strategy by translating partner needs into prioritized platform input.
Enforce productization by ensuring work either generalizes into the shared platform within a defined window or is not reinvested in.
Prevent per-customer forks and core roadmap hijacking by one-off requests.
Develop reference architectures, QA, and monitoring to proactively identify failure modes within integrations.