Head of Forward Engineering

About the Role

Scam and spoofed calls are one of the largest fraud problems in the world, and the place to stop them is inside the network. Hiya's Voice Intelligence Platform serves more than 500 million people in over 40 countries through mobile operators, device makers, and enterprises, deciding in real time which calls to flag, which to block, and which to deliver with a name and a reason attached. Every operator, device maker, and partner that adopts Hiya extends that to everyone they serve, and the engineers who make those adoptions happen are the ones you will lead.

Forward Engineering connects Hiya to the operators, device makers, enterprises, and partners who place and deliver calls. Solutions architects work with a customer from the first technical conversation, showing how Hiya fits and what it will take to launch. Forward deployed engineers integrate, launch, run, and grow each deployment. Our distribution platform gives them the gateways, SDKs, and tooling to bring on new customers quickly and consistently, adapting only where a customer's network requires it. We opened twelve new operator integrations last year; the aim is to do that at a scale and pace we have not reached before.

This is a founding leadership role, reporting to the CTO. You will inherit strong engineers in the United States and Europe, decide how the department is organized, and build it out as Hiya grows in North America, Europe, and Asia. The work comes down to understanding what each customer needs, getting them live quickly, and keeping their service reliable as we scale.
What You'll Do

• Lead and grow forward deployed engineering and solutions architecture across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, and hire the people each market needs
• Own the distribution platform: hosted gateways for our APIs, SDKs for partner and device maker distribution, and the tooling that lets a forward deployed engineer adapt Hiya to a customer's network without forking the product
• Own the reliability and cost to serve of every live integration, and set the on-call and incident model that keeps them running
• Work with Product Engineering on a clear agreement for what Forward Engineering adapts for a customer and how customer needs reach the product roadmap
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success leadership across the full deal lifecycle, from technical pre-sales and solution design through launch, retention, and expansion, and share accountability for those outcomes
• Bring what customers and partners need back to the roadmap as patterns rather than one-off requests
• Hire, coach, and develop managers and senior engineers, and hold the bar on quality and customer trust across every region
• Set the department's strategy and run its operating plan, including headcount, budget, and the metrics you report to the leadership team
• This is a hybrid role with 3 days per week in office in Seattle. Expect 30 to 40 percent travel to customers and partners

What We Are Looking For

• You have 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles, with at least 4 leading engineers and managers
• You have built and led a forward deployed, solutions, or customer engineering organization at a B2B platform company, hired its leaders, and set its operating model
• You have led both engineers who ship production code and engineers who sit with customers, and you manage the two differently
• You have owned a platform or integration layer that many customers depend on, including its on-call, incident response, and cost
• You have worked directly with enterprise or partner sales, shared outcomes with them, and can say plainly what you would and would not promise a customer
• You are technical enough to review an architecture, read a postmortem critically, and ask questions the team missed
• You have led through ambiguity at a startup or growth-stage company and pivoted teams quickly when the facts changed
• You have led teams that use AI coding agents in their daily work and have a clear view of how to keep quality high
• You communicate clearly with executives, customers, and engineers, and you raise issues while there is still time to act on them

You'll Likely Stand Out If You Have

• Telecom experience preferred, but we would rather hire someone who has built and supported platforms customers depend on. We will teach you how the telecom industry works.
• Experience with SIP or other telephony protocols, mobile SDK distribution, or integrations with carriers, communications platforms, or dialers
• Experience running teams across US, European, or Asian time zones, including follow-the-sun support
• Experience with data residency or sovereign hosting requirements

How We Work

Hiya is not a passive environment. We expect people to take ownership, form opinions, and engage directly with hard problems.

We work with a high degree of transparency and autonomy. Context is shared openly, and decisions are discussed, challenged, and then made. Once a call is made, we commit and move forward.

You'll be expected to work through ambiguity, weigh tradeoffs, and take responsibility for results, while keeping a high bar for quality and customer trust.

Every team member at Hiya is expected to live our core values:

• Serve, our customers and partners by holding a high bar for trust and quality
• Own, share in success and open up to failures
• Lead, listen, show up with a point of view but commit entirely once a decision has been made
• Improve, even if it means changing course or contradicting ourselves
• Do, rather than observe

How We Invest in You

Compensation & Ownership
Equity Compensation: ownership aligned with your impact and the company's growth

We offer an L&D budget to support your growth and real internal mobility so career pathing isn't just a talking point - because we're building this with people who own the outcome.