Forward Deployed Engineering Leader

First Resonance

• $150K — $180K *
Technical Services
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years in software engineering or related fields, with 3+ years in management.
  • Proven ability to build and lead high-performing technical teams.
  • Strong technical judgment in modern software systems and cloud infrastructure.
  • Experience managing complex, customer-facing technical programs from start to finish.
  • Excellent executive communication skills and commercial acumen.

Responsibilities

  • Build and lead a high-performing FDE team through hiring, coaching, and setting expectations.
  • Manage the deployment portfolio, prioritizing staffing and risk across customer engagements.
  • Establish high standards for all phases of technical delivery and support.
  • Serve as a key escalation point for critical customer deployments and incidents.
  • Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success to align technical delivery with growth strategies.
  • Create feedback loops with Product and Engineering to enhance solutions and team operations.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance including medical, vision, dental, and life coverage.
  • Paid parental leave for new parents.
  • Employee stock option plan for equity participation.
  • Team outings and social events to foster a collaborative culture.
  • Generous paid holidays and sick leave.
  • Flexible Fridays and paid time off for work-life balance.
  • 401K plan to support retirement savings.
Full Job Description
What you'll own
  • Build and lead an exceptional FDE team: Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers across levels; set clear expectations; give direct feedback; and create meaningful paths for technical and leadership growth.
  • Own the deployment portfolio: Set priorities, staffing, capacity, milestones, and risk management across concurrent customer engagements, ensuring high-quality delivery and measurable customer outcomes.
  • Raise the technical and delivery bar: Establish standards for discovery, architecture, implementation, testing, go-live, documentation, production support, and deployment reviews.
  • Lead critical customer moments: Serve as an executive and technical escalation point for strategic deployments, complex integrations, production incidents, and high-stakes tradeoffs.
  • Connect delivery to growth: Partner with Sales and Customer Success on technical discovery, scoping, expansion strategy, and account planning so FDE capacity produces durable adoption and revenue.
  • Turn field learning into leverage: Create a tight feedback loop with Product and Engineering, productize repeatable customer solutions, improve FDE tooling and automation, and evolve the team's operating model as the company scales.

You will lead through managers and senior individual contributors over time, but you must remain close enough to the work to recognize strong architecture, challenge assumptions, and help the team make sound decisions in unfamiliar customer environments.

What we're looking for
  • 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or enterprise implementation, including 3+ years managing engineers.
  • A track record of building and developing high-performing technical teams while improving both delivery predictability and engineering quality.
  • Strong technical judgment across modern software systems, APIs, integrations, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, security, and production operations.
  • Experience owning a portfolio of complex, customer-facing technical programs from discovery through go-live and ongoing operation.
  • Executive-level communication and commercial judgment: you can align customers and internal leaders, manage scope and risk, and connect technical choices to adoption, expansion, and revenue.


Nice to have
  • Experience leading forward deployed, solutions architecture, professional services, implementation engineering, or technical account teams.
  • Experience with manufacturing, aerospace, defense, energy, industrial software, ERP, PLM, MES, or other operationally complex domains.
  • Evidence of scaling a technical services or deployment function while increasing repeatability, margins, or revenue contribution.
  • Experience partnering with Product and Engineering to turn customer-specific work into reusable platform capabilities.
  • Familiarity with enterprise security, regulated environments, air-gapped networks, and high-availability production systems.


Benefits & Perks
  • Health Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance.
  • Paid Parental Leave.
  • Employee Stock Option Plan.
  • Team outings, group lunches, open office, happy hours.
  • Paid holidays, sick days.
  • Flexible Friday and PTO.
  • 401K.

Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location.

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at First Resonance

More Technical Services Jobs

Find similar Forward Deployed Engineering Leader jobs: