Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

ID.me • Mountain View, CA

20h • $188,000 - $275,000 • Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is looking for a Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering to sit within Product Operations and act as the connective tissue between our customers, our product team, and engineering. This role owns a small team of forward-deployed engineers who embed directly with customers, diagnose real-world integration challenges, and translate what they learn into clear, structured input the product ontology and engineering teams can act on. You'll be equally comfortable in a customer war room and in a backlog-grooming session — someone who can build trust with a customer's technical stakeholders one hour and prioritize your team's next two sprints the next.

Requirements

• 5+ years in a customer-facing engineering role (forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, or implementation engineering), with 2+ years managing engineers.
• Track record of translating messy, real-world customer problems into clear technical specs that engineering and data/ontology teams can execute against.
• Experience building and prioritizing a backlog for a small team under competing customer deadlines.
• Strong technical fluency — comfortable reading API docs, discussing data models, and troubleshooting integrations alongside engineers, without needing to write production code day-to-day.
• Excellent relationship-building skills with both technical and non-technical customer stakeholders, including at the executive level.
• Clear, structured written and verbal communication; comfortable being the bridge in a room full of people who don't naturally speak the same language.

Nice To Haves

• Background in identity proofing, fraud, or data/knowledge graph and ontology systems.
• Prior experience at a high-growth B2B SaaS or platform company.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary translator between customers and ID.me's product ontology and engineering teams — turning ambiguous, in-the-field customer problems into precise technical requirements, data model implications, and well-scoped engineering asks.
• Document and route customer-reported issues, edge cases, and feature gaps so product ontology and engineering have the context they need without having to talk to the customer directly.
• Build repeatable processes (templates, intake forms, escalation paths) that keep customer problems from getting lost or garbled between teams.
• Manage and grow a team of forward deployed engineers, setting clear goals and providing technical and career mentorship.
• Build, maintain, and prioritize the team's backlog of customer-driven work, balancing urgent customer needs against long-term platform and ontology investments.
• Partner with Product Operations and Engineering leadership to align FDE work with broader roadmap and capacity planning.
• Establish metrics to track team throughput, customer impact, and time-to-resolution, and use them to continuously improve how the team operates.
• Build durable, trusted relationships with customer technical and business stakeholders, acting as a face of ID.me during implementation, expansion, and escalation moments.
• Travel on-site or join deep working sessions with customers as needed to understand their environment firsthand.
• Represent the voice of the customer internally, and represent ID.me's technical roadmap and constraints externally, in a way that keeps both sides aligned.

Benefits

• comprehensive medical, dental, vision
• health savings account
• flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts)
• basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• parental leave
• ability to participate in unlimited paid time off subject to the terms and conditions of the PTO policy, including 8 company wide holidays
• short and long-term disability insurance
• accident and critical illness insurance
• referral bonus policy
• employee assistance program
• pet insurance
• travel assistant program
• wellbeing and childcare discounts
• benefit advocates
• learning and development benefit

What This Job Offers

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