Build and Scale the FDE Team
Recruit top talent: Own hiring strategy and execution for FDEs
Develop your team: Mentor FDEs through hands-on coaching, career development, and technical guidance
Define the role: Evolve the FDE career ladder, competencies, and growth paths
Foster culture: Build a team culture grounded in ownership, customer-first mentality, and continuous learning
Refine Processes and Drive Operational Excellence
Optimize the customer lifecycle: Design and refine how FDEs engage across sales
Scale what works: Identify patterns in successful deployments and turn them into repeatable processes
Balance speed and quality: Establish frameworks for scoping, prioritization, and delivery
Measure what matters: Define team metrics and KPIs tied to customer outcomes
Drive Product Improvements
Be the voice of the customer: Synthesize customer feedback, pain points, and feature requests
Close the feedback loop: Partner closely with Product and Engineering teams
Champion generalization: Push the team to build scalable solutions
Lead Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner with Product: Work with PMs to translate customer insights into product strategy
Align with Engineering: Collaborate with core engineering teams to ensure FDE-built features integrate seamlessly
Enable Go-to-Market: Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success
Influence leadership: Present customer insights, deployment learnings, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership
Stay Hands-On (When Needed)
Jump into the fire: Roll up your sleeves to support critical deployments
Stay technical: Maintain credibility by staying close to the codebase
Lead by example: Model the behaviors you want to see

Requirements

Engineering management experience: At least 2 years managing, mentoring, and growing engineering teams
Customer-facing engineering background: Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Implementation Engineer, or similar role working directly with customers
Technical depth: Strong software engineering fundamentals (coding, system design, APIs, databases)
AI/LLM familiarity: Hands-on experience with AI agents, LLMs, prompt engineering, or ML deployments in production
Hiring and talent development: Proven track record of recruiting, onboarding, and developing high-performing engineers
Cross-functional leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence and collaborate across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success teams
Bias toward action: You ship fast, iterate, and believe that perfect is the enemy of good
Customer empathy: Deep understanding of enterprise customer needs
Startup or scale-up experience: You've been in fast-paced, high-growth environments where you wore multiple hats
Enterprise B2B background: Experience with complex, multi-stakeholder deployments and long sales cycles
Product mindset: You think like a product manager — understanding market needs, prioritization, and trade-offs
Process design: You've built processes from scratch and iterated on them based on what works
Founder or entrepreneurial experience: You've started something, built something from zero, or operated with extreme ownership

Benefits

📊 Check your resume score for this job Improve your chances of getting an interview by checking your resume score before you apply. Check Resume Score

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

software engineeringsystem designAPIsdatabasesAI agentsLLMsprompt engineeringML deploymentsprocess designcustomer lifecycle optimization

Soft Skills

mentoringteam developmentcross-functional leadershipcustomer empathybias toward actioninfluenceownershipcontinuous learningcollaborationcommunication