Director – Forward Deployed Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Arizona, +6 more states.

📋 Description

• Build, mentor, and expand a Forward Deployed Engineering team consisting of around five engineers.

• Set objectives, career tracks, feedback mechanisms, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and customer orientation.

• Establish engineering standards for coding, prompting, agent design, testing, evaluation, and production readiness.

• Develop staffing models and allocate FDE talent to high-value projects.

• Recruit, onboard, mentor, and retain Forward Deployed Engineers.

• Oversee delivery from use case through prototype, live testing, production, and optimization.

• Collaborate with Sales, Account Teams, Pre-Sales, FDE leaders, and Customer Success to prioritize AI use cases and outline measurable outcomes.

• Act as an escalation point for significant engagements and foster relationships with customer CIOs, CTOs, digital, and CX leaders.

• Propel prototype-to-production transitions through KPIs, readiness frameworks, evaluation pipelines, guardrails, and operational transfers.

• Develop repeatable delivery methodologies, playbooks, and engagement frameworks.

• Organize skills, agents, prompts, integrations, evaluations, and deployment patterns into reusable assets and reference architectures.

• Advocate for AI-native development and the adoption of coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, and Kiro.

• Contribute to significant AI achievements and referenceable customer success stories.

• Transform field insights into product requirements and influence the roadmap for Product and Engineering.

• Collaborate on engagement triggers, target accounts, scoping, positioning, and expansion opportunities.

• Align strategy with leaders across FDE, Pre-Sales, AI Architecture, and Services.

• Establish metrics and executive reporting for time-to-value, deployment milestones, adoption, satisfaction, AI-influenced ACV, asset reuse, and utilization.

• Contribute to commercial and IP considerations for jointly developed solutions.

• Review architectures and engage in critical customer moments as necessary.

⛳️ Requirements

• 5+ years of experience leading customer-facing technical teams such as forward deployed engineering, solutions architecture, pre-sales engineering, technical consulting, or professional services.

• Strong preference for candidates with experience in establishing a new team or service line.

• Proven track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.

• Experience operating within highly matrixed, customer-facing enterprise organizations, and aligning Sales, Product, Engineering, and Services.

• Demonstrated leadership in innovation and ability to create repeatable processes.

• Strong hands-on experience in software engineering.

• Proficient in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, or equivalent languages.

• Familiarity with REST APIs, Git, and modern cloud architectures such as AWS.

• Practical understanding of LLMs and agentic AI, including prompting, tool calling, orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, grounding, evaluation, guardrails, and observability.

• Experience transitioning AI or software solutions from prototype to production, including enterprise systems, data, and API integrations.

• Knowledge of AI-native development environments and coding agents.

• Expertise in Genesys, CX, contact center, or conversational/voice AI is valuable but not mandatory.

• Ability to translate complex AI architectures into business outcomes and measurable ROI.

• Strong storytelling, workshop facilitation, and stakeholder management capabilities.

• Understanding of enterprise sales cycles, value-based positioning, and the effect of technical delivery on adoption, renewal, and expansion.

• Ability to balance customer success investment with commercial discipline and prioritize amidst ambiguity.

• A proactive approach, high sense of ownership, and urgency.

• Willingness to travel to customer sites and team events as required by engagements.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance.

• Telehealth coverage.

• Flexible work schedules and opportunities to work from home.

• Opportunities for development and career growth.

• Open Time Off.

• 10 paid holidays.

• 401(k) matching program.

• Adoption Assistance.

• Fertility treatments.

• Paid volunteer time.

• August Free Fridays.

• Well-being resources.

• Regionally tailored programs for employees and their families.

• Mentorship, learning programs, leadership development, and education support.