Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

MongoDB•New York, NY

23h•$151,000 - $297,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Staff Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) sit at the intersection of enterprise customer environments and a fast-moving internal product. They are senior technical leaders who own ambiguous, high-impact problems that span customer engagements, product direction, and engineering execution. They are accountable not only for getting customers to production, but for using what is learned in the field to shape reusable product capabilities, technical strategy, and delivery quality across multiple teams. This role is best suited for engineers who want to combine hands-on technical depth with broad influence: defining or changing strategy when customer reality reveals a gap, guiding technical decisions across teams, and translating field insight into durable product and engineering improvements. We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in New York City, NY for our hybrid working model.

Requirements

9+ years of relevant engineering experience, including hands-on work in production systems and complex customer or enterprise environments
Demonstrated success leading technical domains or initiatives that span multiple teams, with ownership of technical direction and delivery outcomes
Strong experience designing and implementing production-grade integrations, platforms, or distributed systems in ambiguous environments
Strong technical judgment, including the ability to balance customer impact, speed, maintainability, and operational risk
Ability to shape technical direction based on customer and business context, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and raise the bar for other engineers through mentorship and technical leadership
Willingness and ability to travel up to 30% to customer sites as needed for on-site engagements, technical reviews, and executive or customer presentations

Nice To Haves

Experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, or deploying AI systems in production enterprise environments
Prior experience in a forward-deployed engineering role or a similarly hybrid role spanning customer environments, product influence, and hands-on engineering execution
Experience leading multi-team technical initiatives from problem definition through adoption, especially in environments with significant ambiguity or cross-functional dependency

Responsibilities

Own the most complex customer engagements and technical workstreams, especially where the problem, solution, or path to production is ambiguous
Build deep understanding of customer architecture, business goals, constraints, and definition of success, and use that understanding to shape the technical approach rather than only execute within a predefined one
Act as a trusted technical counterpart to customer’s engineering leaders, internal product and engineering leaders, and executive stakeholders when navigating complex tradeoffs, risks, and priorities
Lead architectural design for customer-facing solutions and platform capabilities within the FDE domain, balancing hands-on implementation with technical decision-making across multiple teams
Take ambiguous, high-level problems and turn them into clear technical direction, implementation plans, milestones, and ownership boundaries that enable execution at quality and speed
Continue to write and review production-quality code, troubleshoot complex failures, and set a high bar for correctness, maintainability, observability, and operational readiness in the systems and integrations this role touches
Identify systemic issues in tooling, architecture, or delivery and drive durable fixes that improve outcomes across engagements rather than solving each issue as a one-off
Use field engagements to surface domain-level patterns, product gaps, and technical risks, and translate them into actionable proposals, design direction, and roadmap input
Influence short- to mid-term technical vision for the FDE domain, partnering with Product and Engineering leaders to balance customer impact, time-to-market, technical debt, and long-term platform quality
Help determine which field-learned patterns should remain engagement-specific and which should become reusable product capabilities, standards, or platform investments
Lead focused cross-functional workstreams with Product and Engineering, especially where field experience is necessary to define requirements, resolve tradeoffs, and deliver the right outcome
Drive consensus on large, abstract, or contentious technical issues that affect multiple teams, and resolve deadlocks through strong judgment, clear reasoning, and durable written artifacts
Create high-quality technical artifacts such as designs, decision logs, and proposals that align stakeholders and raise the standard for how teams communicate and execute
Act as a force multiplier for the broader organization by mentoring senior engineers, sharing best practices across teams, and helping others make strong technical decisions in this domain
Establish or improve mechanisms, standards, and operating practices that help teams make high-quality decisions and deliver resilient solutions independently
Model MongoDB’s leadership principles through clarity, accountability, customer obsession, and strong cross-functional partnership in situations of high ambiguity and consequence