Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Replit•Foster City, CA

10d•$300,000 - $400,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Replit is seeking a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead a team focused on helping strategic enterprise customers operationalize Replit within their organizations. This role operates at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer transformation, with Forward Deployed Engineers embedding deeply with customers to solve technical problems, build production systems, and define how enterprises adopt AI-native software development. This is a hands-on role for software engineers who will be advanced users of Replit and AI-native development workflows, leveraging AI agents and automation to accelerate customer outcomes. The position requires strong technical depth, product instincts, customer judgment, and the ability to thrive in ambiguous, high-velocity environments.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in engineering, infrastructure, developer tools, applied AI, or customer engineering environments.
Experience leading Forward Deployed Engineering, Applied AI, Solutions Architecture, or Strategic Engineering teams.
Deep curiosity around AI-native software development and strong instincts for how AI changes engineering workflows.
Experience leading high-performing technical organizations.
Strong technical judgment and the ability to operate credibly with senior engineers and executives.
Experience building and shipping production systems in fast-moving environments.
Strong product instincts and systems thinking.
Comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal process.
Excellent communication and customer leadership skills.
Strong sense of ownership and urgency.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI agents, LLM workflows, or developer tooling platforms.
Experience supporting Fortune 500 engineering organizations.
Startup or founder experience.
Experience working closely with Product organizations to shape roadmap direction.

Responsibilities

Build and lead the FDE organization, including hiring and developing a high-talent-density team.
Define hiring standards, operating principles, and execution standards for the organization.
Foster a team culture focused on speed, ownership, pragmatism, and customer impact.
Develop systems and tooling to enable team scalability without excessive process.
Work directly with strategic customers, partnering with engineering leaders, product teams, and executives.
Help customers redesign workflows around AI-native software development.
Lead complex technical engagements involving integrations, infrastructure, agents, automation, and internal developer platforms.
Unblock high-stakes deployments and guide customers from experimentation to production adoption.
Lead teams in building real applications and workflows within customer environments.
Drive rapid prototyping and iteration cycles with customers.
Participate in architecture reviews, debugging, implementation strategy, and live builds.
Identify repeatable customer implementation patterns and translate them into reusable platform capabilities.
Partner closely with Product and Engineering to integrate customer learnings into the core platform.
Contribute production-ready code, tooling, integrations, and reference architectures.
Create tight feedback loops between customer environments and Replit’s internal product development teams.
Partner with Sales, Field Engineering, and Product on strategic accounts.
Improve customer adoption, expansion, retention, and deployment velocity.
Serve as an executive escalation point for critical customer situations.
Contribute to defining how Replit scales enterprise adoption globally.