Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Job description

About Parloa Parloa’s mission is to make every customer conversation feel effortless for both customers and the companies serving them. As agentic AI accelerates, Parloans are shaping the foundation of a new era in customer experience, one where customer support is no longer transactions, but meaningful exchanges. It is not just a vision; Parloa has powered over ONE BILLION interactions between global enterprise brands and their customers, with companies like Booking.com, HealthEquity, Allianz, SAP, BarmeniaGothaer, and TUI already deploying Parloa at scale. About the role: As a Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Parloa, you’ll be on the front lines of enterprise AI adoption — leading a high-impact team of FDEs that delivers our most strategic enterprise deployments. Your mission is to ensure our consistent deployment excellence: predictable delivery, strong engineering quality, and fast unblocking in complex enterprise environments — while staying technically credible yourself. FDEs are our in-field engineers. They build what doesn’t exist yet, adapt architecture to enterprise realities, and engineer integrations across systems and APIs to make deployments successful. As a Manager, you make that work repeatable and reliable across multiple customer projects — through strong delivery leadership, clear priorities, and hands-on technical guidance. Areas of ownership: Lead and develop the team: hire, coach, and grow a team of FDEs; set clear expectations; run 1:1s, feedback cycles, and performance development. Own capacity planning and staffing: allocate engineers across parallel strategic projects, manage load and utilization, and anticipate delivery bottlenecks early. Drive project delivery management: own engineering delivery across deployments — milestones, dependencies, risk management, escalation paths, and stakeholder alignment. Establish time tracking and delivery visibility: implement lightweight tracking and reporting that creates trusted insight into effort, progress, and capacity (without bureaucracy). Provide technical leadership and escalation support: guide architecture and implementation choices, review designs/code when needed, and unblock high-severity issues in production environments. Create scalable field engineering practices: build reusable patterns, playbooks, and standards that improve reliability, maintainability, and speed acro…