Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

We are hiring a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead the software engineers who bring those workflows into production. You will combine engineering leadership, practical delivery experience, and a deep understanding of law-firm technology to help clients move from a promising use case to a reliable, supported deployment. This role reports to the CEO. The aim is to have this role have 5 people reporting to it over the next 6 months. The Opportunity At Newcode, engineering and client delivery are central to the business. You will shape the FDE function, develop its people and delivery methods, and use client experience to influence the platform. This is a hands-on leadership role: you must be able to assess architecture, review code, debug difficult integrations, and lead important client conversations while building a team that can deliver without depending on you for every decision. We expect roughly 40% of your time to be hands-on technical work: design reviews, code reviews, and debugging critical integrations. How the team works Client delivery takes place in pods comprising a senior legal engineer, a forward-deployed engineer, and an account manager focused on retention and expansion. The senior legal engineer leads the pod and owns the legal problem, workflow requirements, and legal acceptance criteria. The FDE translates those requirements into working software, integrations, and deployable components. You will manage the FDEs across pods and own engineering quality, staffing, coaching, and technical delivery practices. You will partner with the head of legal engineering, commercial leaders, and core engineering to align client priorities, technical feasibility, and platform investment. You will also serve as the FDE in the pods for our most strategic and complex US firms, and you will set the standard for forward deployment at Newcode: the Aurora playbook, the AI Academy for Aurora users, and the field patterns that make it into the product. What you will own • Build and lead the FDE team: recruit strong engineers, coach their development, set expectations, and establish clear technical standards. • Lead technical discovery with law-firm technology teams; map data flows, integrations, access controls, dependencies, and deployment constraints. • Guide implementation of Aurora workflows, connectors, and client-specific extensions; stay close enough to the work to review designs and unblock delivery. • Run the AI Academy for each firm's Aurora users, which is where every engagement starts. • Configure Aurora flows around each firm's use cases, starting with the ones agreed in the tailored demo, and join tailored demos when a firm's needs call for Aurora. • Map how practice groups such as litigation, M&A, regulatory, and knowledge management work, and turn that into flow designs lawyers trust. • Design evals with each firm so quality is measured in lawyers' terms, not just model metrics. • Earn the trust of CIOs, innovation leaders, and firm engineers through specific deployment experience, candid tradeoffs, and dependable follow-through. • Establish a repeatable path from discovery and scoping through evaluation, release, monitoring, support, and handoff. Define ownership before work goes live. • Protect client confidentiality and access boundaries. Ensure solutions have appropriate testing, traceability, observability, and human review for their intended use. • Set realistic estimates and delivery commitments with legal engineering and account management; surface scope changes, risks, and dependencies early. • Partner with core engineering on missing capabilities. Identify extensions worth reusing and ensure shared platform changes have a named owner and support plan. • Be the field's voice in roadmap decisions. Bring patterns, not anecdotes, with a view on how often a need comes up and what it would take to build it into the product. • Partner with our Oslo Product and Engineering teams across time zones, and represent the US customer in core platform decisions. • Track delivery speed, reliability, workflow adoption, engineering effort, and reuse; use the results to improve client outcomes, estimates, and delivery economics. Requirements What you bring • Demonstrated experience hiring, managing, and developing software engineers who deliver and support production systems. • Direct experience deploying technology within law firms, either as an internal technology leader or a vendor delivery leader with substantial firm exposure. • Practical fluency in law-firm systems and operating constraints, including document management, matter permissions and ethical walls, identity, knowledge systems, and billing or practice-management integrations. • An understanding of how law-firm work gets done, from document review and due diligence to litigation support and knowledge management, and how lawyers judge quality. • A strong engineering background: 5+ years building production software, with a computer science or engineering degree or equivalent experience. • Strong software engineering judgment across APIs, integration design, data access, cloud deployment, testing, incident handling, and maintainability. You can interrogate implementation details, you still write production code (Python or TypeScript), and you are comfortable debugging in a client environment. • Hands-on experience taking LLM-based or agentic workflows into production, including retrieval, agents and tool use, structured outputs, guardrails, evaluation design, permission-aware data access, failure handling, and monitoring. • Experience turning ambiguous client needs into scoped, measurable delivery plans and explaining technical tradeoffs to executives and implementation teams. • The range to earn the trust of a managing partner and pair with an engineer on the same day, explaining tradeoffs in plain language. • A record of building repeatable delivery practices and reusable components rather than relying on individual heroics. Comfort building a function in an evolving company. Additional experience we value Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365; iManage or comparable document management systems; ethical-wall and matter-security tooling; Elite, Aderant, or similar finance platforms; and experience building a customer-facing engineering function. A law degree is not required; direct law-firm technology deployment experience is. A law degree (JD, LLM, or equivalent), or experience practicing law or working in legal operations or legal innovation, is a plus. We value demonstrated capability over a particular degree or job title. What success looks like In your first 30 days, you will map active deployments, team capabilities, and delivery risks, and set baselines for delivery time, effort, adoption, and production issues. By 60 days, a delivery playbook is running on at least two active deployments, with staffing plans, technical reviews, release criteria, and support ownership in place. By 90 days, the team delivers across at least three client engagements, including at least one led day to day by an FDE other than you, and at least one component has been reused. By 180 days, you lead a team of five people that delivers repeatably across multiple clients, and firm technology leaders trust the team. You will see these milestones from your first day, and we will review your progress against them with you at 30, 60, 90, and 180 days. Location: Chicago, hybrid, 3 days per week in the office. Expect client travel of roughly 30%, typically for discovery workshops and go-live support, with occasional trips to Oslo. Collaboration with distributed colleagues is part of the role. Benefits Competitive base salary with equity and bonus. Benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance; 401(k); paid time off; and parental leave. Visa Sponsorship: At this time, Newcode is unable to provide visa sponsorship. Candidates must be authorized to work in the applicable country without employer sponsorship.