Head of Forward Engineering

Hiya•Seattle, WA

1d•$197,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Hiya is hiring a founding Head of Forward Engineering to lead the teams and platform that connect Hiya to operators, device makers, enterprises, and partners. Hiya's Voice Intelligence Platform serves more than 500 million people in over 40 countries, helping determine in real time which calls to flag, block, or deliver with caller identity and context. The role reports to the CTO and inherits engineering teams in the United States and Europe. The successful candidate will shape the department's organization and growth as Hiya expands across North America, Europe, and Asia. Forward Engineering includes solutions architects, who guide customers from initial technical discussions through solution design, and forward deployed engineers, who integrate, launch, operate, and grow deployments. The team also owns a distribution platform of hosted API gateways, SDKs, and tooling that helps onboard customers consistently while accommodating network-specific needs. The role is responsible for increasing the pace and scale of customer integrations, maintaining reliability and cost efficiency, and ensuring customer needs inform product direction. This is a hybrid role with three days per week in the Seattle office and an expected 30–40% travel to customers and partners. Hiya describes its working environment as high-ownership, transparent, autonomous, and oriented toward taking responsibility for results, quality, and customer trust.

Requirements

At least 10 years of experience in customer-facing technical roles.
At least 4 years leading engineers and managers.
Experience building and leading a forward deployed, solutions, or customer engineering organization at a B2B platform company, including hiring its leaders and setting its operating model.
Experience leading both engineers who ship production code and engineers who work directly with customers, with management approaches suited to each.
Experience owning a platform or integration layer relied on by multiple customers, including on-call, incident response, and cost.
Experience working directly with enterprise or partner sales, sharing outcomes, and setting clear boundaries on customer commitments.
Technical ability to review architectures, critically assess postmortems, and identify questions the team may have missed.
Experience leading through ambiguity at a startup or growth-stage company and quickly adjusting teams as circumstances change.
Experience leading teams that use AI coding agents in daily work, with a clear approach to maintaining quality.
Clear communication with executives, customers, and engineers, and ability to raise issues early enough to act on them.

Nice To Haves

Telecom experience is preferred, though Hiya states it is willing to teach the industry to a candidate with relevant platform-building experience.
Experience with SIP or other telephony protocols, mobile SDK distribution, or integrations with carriers, communications platforms, or dialers.
Experience running teams across US, European, or Asian time zones, including follow-the-sun support.
Experience with data residency or sovereign hosting requirements.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow forward deployed engineering and solutions architecture across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, and hire for the needs of each market.
Own the distribution platform, including hosted API gateways, SDKs for partner and device-maker distribution, and tools that let engineers adapt deployments to customer networks without forking the product.
Own the reliability and cost to serve of live integrations, and establish the on-call and incident response model.
Work with Product Engineering to define which customer adaptations Forward Engineering handles and how customer needs reach the product roadmap.
Partner with Sales and Customer Success throughout the deal lifecycle, from technical pre-sales and solution design through launch, retention, and expansion, sharing accountability for outcomes.
Identify recurring customer and partner needs and bring them to the roadmap as patterns rather than one-off requests.
Hire, coach, and develop managers and senior engineers, maintaining standards for quality and customer trust across regions.
Set the department's strategy and operating plan, including headcount, budget, and metrics reported to the leadership team.