Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Job description

TL;DR We’re hiring a Manager to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Customer Engineering. You build a healthy, high-trust team and make sure it delivers deepset’s AI Platform into enterprise and public sector production environments, on target and on quality. You came up close to the work and still go deep when it matters. Why deepset At deepset, we’re on a mission to make custom AI solutions accessible to every organization. With Haystack, thousands of developers build advanced LLM applications every day, while our enterprise-ready AI Platform helps companies turn large language models into business value. We’re remote-first, flexible, and built on a culture of trust and ownership. You’ll collaborate with top-tier tech talent, tackle meaningful challenges, and help transform complex AI into solutions that are simple, powerful, and ready for the real world. What you will do Lead and Develop the Team Own team health and culture across the four FDE profiles (Advisory, Builder, Operating, Support): a safe space where hard questions are welcome and engineers share patterns instead of working in silos. Run strong 1:1s and career conversations so every FDE knows where they stand and how to grow. Build the hiring and onboarding pipeline for a remote-first, async-heavy team. Clear blockers fast, and escalate the ones you can’t resolve before they become delivery risks. Run the Delivery Engine Staff the right FDE profile to the right engagement and deliver against your team’s utilization targets, protecting against both burnout and idle capacity. Hold the technical bar: review architecture and solution decisions across RAG pipelines, retrieval quality, deployment topology, and production operations. Deliver engagements on scope and on plan, follow our delivery processes, and own resolution of customer escalations. Collaborate Across the Organization Partner with the Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope, feasibility, and staffing, with clear ownership at each handoff. Feed field insight to Product and Engineering, and build reusable patterns that reduce custom work. What you bring to the team Experience leading customer-facing engineering, professional services, or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI, or infrastructure. Strong coaching instincts: you develop engineers and build high-trust teams. Technical depth to hold the bar: RAG (retrie…