Technical Lead Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the engineering team that unblocks high-priority, customer-facing work for Handshake AI's most strategic partners. FDEs are technical builders: they ship end-to-end solutions in close collaboration with researchers, operators, and partner technical teams. As a Tech Lead Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, you are first and foremost a builder. You'll spend the majority of your time writing code, designing systems, and shipping solutions directly alongside customers — while also owning the technical direction and day-to-day leadership of a small team of FDEs. This is a player-coach role: the best person for this job is someone who would be frustrated behind a desk managing full-time and wants to stay close to the craft. This role is ideal for a senior engineer ready to take on their first or second management scope without leaving the work behind — someone who leads by example, builds trust through technical credibility, and creates structure without bureaucracy.

Requirements

6+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful depth in backend, fullstack, or systems work.
2+ years in a customer-facing or field engineering role (e.g., forward deployed, solutions engineering, field engineering, customer-embedded product development).
Experience as a tech lead or TLM — setting technical direction for a team, not just owning your own work.
1–2 years managing a small team of engineers (3–6); comfortable with feedback, growth conversations, and performance.
Must be someone who codes regularly and wants to keep coding
Ability to translate technical tradeoffs into business decisions; comfortable presenting options and recommendations to both technical and non-technical partners.
Strong stakeholder management skills; builds trust quickly with external partners and communicates clearly under pressure.
Strong instincts on triage and prioritization across multiple concurrent engagements.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI/ML product integrations or production reliability in AI systems.
Familiarity with distributed systems and backend architecture at scale.
Experience building reusable platforms or internal tooling from bespoke customer solutions.
Background working with operations-heavy or research-adjacent organizations.

Responsibilities

Own and ship end-to-end technical solutions directly for Handshake AI's highest-priority customer engagements.
Design and build integrations, tooling, APIs, and workflows in close collaboration with partner technical teams, researchers, and operators.
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for key accounts — understanding their systems deeply and delivering solutions that work in production.
Write production-quality code and architect systems that are reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable.
Manage and develop a small team of 3–5 Forward Deployed Engineers — set expectations, unblock, and grow them.
Own technical quality across the team's engagements — review work, raise the bar, and ensure strong engineering fundamentals.
Help prioritize and triage across competing requests; flag capacity and scope issues early.
Identify patterns across customer engagements and build the reusable components that scale the team's output.