Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

About the Role

We're extremely hands-on with customers. Onboarding involves data integration (connecting to their Salesforce, transforming their data into our standardized format), configuration, often a 1-month pilot where we iterate to prove ROI, and ongoing iteration post-conversion. We run discovery to deeply understand each customer’s business, build product capabilities tailored to their workflows, and explore new use cases alongside them.

This has been working great, with a high conversion rate from qualified pilot to paying customer, and we typically pay for ourselves multiple times over in the pilot alone. But it takes serious hands-on work, and today our small, mighty, and growing FDE team is running these engagements. 

We're looking for a player-coach to lead this function. You'll personally own our most strategic deployments while hiring, mentoring, and building the playbooks and tooling that let us scale this motion 5-10x.

This is explicitly not a hands-off management role. You'll be in the data, on customer calls, and shipping code roughly half your time. The other half is making everyone around you better and turning artisanal work into a repeatable system.

Day in the Life

You'll operate as a blend of:

• An FDE – personally leading 1-2 strategic deployments so you can coach credibly and feel what your team feels
• An engineering manager – hiring, coaching, and setting the bar for technical and customer excellence
• A founder – extreme ownership over deployment velocity, customer outcomes, and team health
• A PM – turning patterns from deployments into product defaults and internal tooling, so each deployment is easier than the last
• A GTM partner – shaping which customers we take on, how pilots are scoped, and how we hand off to long-term success

Who You Are

• You've done the IC job and were great at it. Former FDE, customer-facing product engineer, or founder-operator who personally onboarded early customers. Strong Python and SQL, ML fundamentals, real interest or experience with LLMs. Know how to dive in deep and scale up.
• Player-coach by temperament, not just title. You don't see coding as something you've graduated from, and you don't see management as paperwork.
• Detail-oriented at scale. You can hold the texture of several deployments in your head at once and know which details actually matter.
• High ownership and ambition. Pragmatic, ships quickly, excited to own a top-three company priority.
• Loves customers and loves talent. You can sit in a customer's pain, translate it to their real problem, and turn it into a product improvement. You also have a track record of attracting strong people and helping them grow.
• High slope. Learns fast, knows how you learn best, expects the same of the team you build.

Ideally:

• 5+ years of experience, much of it in FDE, Solutions Engineering, customer-facing Data Science, or as a founder/early operator
• Prior experience leading or mentoring others 
• Owned end-to-end customer delivery at a hyper-growth startup or top tech company
• Bonus: built playbooks, internal tooling, or onboarding systems that outlasted you