Head of Forward Deployment Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York.

📋 Description

• Define and enhance the vision, operating model, execution playbooks, resource strategy, and quarterly priorities for the FDE organization.

• Lead, mentor, and develop an existing team of Forward Deployed Engineers by elevating hiring standards, technical excellence, execution, and customer impact.

• Take ownership of the technical strategy for Tavily's key enterprise accounts, overseeing everything from discovery and solution design to POCs, production rollout, and expansion.

• Collaborate closely with Sales and Customer Success to shape the technical strategy for strategic accounts, expedite enterprise adoption, and drive opportunities for expansion.

• Act as the senior technical representative with executive stakeholders, including CTOs, VPs of Engineering, founders, and technical decision-makers.

• Remain actively involved by leading strategic customer engagements and creating reference implementations, retrieval pipelines, agentic systems, production integrations, and technical prototypes utilizing the Tavily API.

• Support selected high-impact technical initiatives that require senior field expertise, including strategic customer, product, or partner-facing projects.

• Develop scalable internal resources, including playbooks, demo environments, documentation, reference architectures, tools, and reusable templates.

• Transform customer patterns and technical feedback into clear recommendations for product and engineering roadmaps.

• Represent Tavily externally in executive customer discussions, strategic engagements, developer communities, conferences, and technical content.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, with significant expertise in customer-facing technical roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Solutions Engineer, or Sales Engineer.

• More than 4 years of experience building or leading customer-facing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational scaling.

• Strong hands-on engineering proficiency in Python, APIs, distributed systems, and contemporary software architecture.

• Extensive experience in designing and constructing production AI systems, including LLM applications, agentic workflows, retrieval architectures, evaluation systems, and the infrastructure needed for reliable operation at scale.

• Solid familiarity with the modern AI application stack, including agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval infrastructure, evaluation tools, and production deployment patterns.

• Demonstrated success leading the technical aspects of enterprise engagements from initial architectural discussions through to successful production deployment and expansion.

• Strong business acumen and commercial judgment, capable of balancing customer outcomes, engineering investment, and company priorities in making technical and organizational decisions.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills across executive, technical, and developer audiences.

• A builder's mindset, with the ability to establish structure, operating rhythms, and scalable playbooks in dynamic and ambiguous environments.

• Based in New York City or willing to relocate, or capable of maintaining a strong presence with the team and customers.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health Insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families.

• 401(k) Plan: Up to 4% company match with immediate vesting.

• Parental Leave: 20 weeks paid leave for primary caregivers and 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.

• Remote Work Reimbursement: Up to $85/month for mobile and internet expenses.

• Disability & Life Insurance: Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.