Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Circuit•Austin, TX

30d•Hybrid

About The Position

Circuit is the AI execution layer for the physical economy. Industrial and manufacturing enterprises run on expertise: the hard-won knowledge of how complex products are engineered, configured, sold, and supported. That expertise is scarce, slow to transfer, and walking out the door as a generation of experts retires. It lives in PDFs, spreadsheets, and the heads of a few people, and the hardest technical decisions wait on whoever happens to know. Circuit puts expert judgment in everyone's hands. We capture how the best people make critical technical decisions and turn it into agents that do the judgment-heavy work, so anyone, regardless of skill level, can make the right call, from quote to install and support, with the accuracy these environments demand. Circuit is built by operators. Our leadership team has built and scaled real industrial companies, and we are already live in production with category-leading manufacturers. We are not bolting AI onto an old playbook. We are building the layer that runs the last mile of how the physical economy executes.

Requirements

8 to 12+ years in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Presales, including time leading or mentoring other engineers
Proven track record owning the technical win in complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals and carrying solutions through to live production deployments, presenting credibly from engineers to executives
Strong technical fluency with APIs, data structures, and system architectures, comfortable writing scripts and integration code (Python, SQL, API integrations) with modern AI coding tools when a deployment needs it.
Strong working understanding of modern AI systems, including LLMs, agentic workflows, and retrieval, and how AI-native products are architected and deployed in the enterprise
Demonstrated ability to build tailored demos and POC environments, and the templates and process that scale them across a team
Experience translating complex customer requirements into clear product or engineering inputs
Willingness to travel to customer sites regularly, up to 25%

Nice To Haves

Domain expertise in industrial or manufacturing environments, including CPQ platforms (Salesforce CPQ, Oracle CPQ, Tacton, Epicor CPQ, or similar), ERP systems (SAP, NetSuite, Epicor, Infor, Dynamics), configure-to-order or engineer-to-order processes, or takeoff and estimation workflows in construction and commercial services
A player-coach at heart, energized by both winning deals and growing the people around you.
Excellent communicator, able to guide customers and your own team through complex technical concepts.
Highly collaborative across Sales, Product, and Engineering.
Adaptable and energized by early-stage ambiguity and hands-on work.
Curious and low-ego, with a learning mindset around AI, manufacturing systems, and workflows.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop the Forward Deployed Engineering team, raising the technical bar so every FDE can architect agentic solutions and translate Circuit into a customer's specific workflow, outcomes, and ROI.
Hire to grow the team when needed.
Build the FDE playbook end to end, from technical discovery and qualification through solution design, POC, pilot, and production deployment.
Develop reusable demo templates, solution patterns, and example datasets that scale the team's output.
Partner with Account Executives on the most strategic and complex deals, owning the technical win from first demo through pilot, close, and go-live.
Lead deep technical discovery across data, documents, workflows, and integrations, and deliver high-impact demos tailored to customer workflows and industry use cases.
Architect, configure, and deploy agentic workflows, embedding with customers and their subject matter experts to prove out measurable outcomes in POCs, pilots, and production.
Serve as the credible technical authority on architecture, integrations, AI capabilities, permissions, security, and deployment.
Drive the edge-to-product flywheel: pioneer new use cases in the field, then work with Product and Engineering to turn them into repeatable, productized motions.
Sequence the team's work methodically, scaling from standard use cases to new ones, balancing cutting-edge field work with scalable engineering deployment.
Serve as a primary technical voice of the customer, synthesizing field signal, recurring patterns, and platform friction into clear, prioritized product requirements.
Build the infrastructure that lets the team scale, including demo environments, technical qualification standards, clean handoffs to Customer Success, and success metrics across the deal and deployment lifecycle, tracked in Attio.