Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, develop, and retain Forward Deployed Engineers across New York and San Francisco; define career paths and growth trajectories.
• Set the function’s strategy and operating model, including pilots, onboarding, support, account coverage, expansion, and scaling processes.
• Partner with Sales, GTM, Engineering, and customer executives on technical evaluations, customer problems, and product feedback.

What they ask for

• 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years leading customer-facing engineering teams.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, with the ability to work deeply with customer architectures and data infrastructure.
• Experience across pre-sales and post-sales enterprise engagements, including technical pilots, onboarding, support, and account expansion.
• Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain engineers; experience at an early-stage, high-growth startup; and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

Nice to have

• Previous experience as a forward deployed engineer or FDE leader at a high-growth startup; experience scaling a customer-facing engineering function from single-digit to multi-team.
• Experience building production ML systems, ML infrastructure, or data platforms, or working with enterprise customers in regulated industries.

Pay

$300K – $350K (base salary)

Tools

Python, SQL

AI focus

Leads customer-facing engineering engagements integrating Chalk’s platform for production AI, including use cases involving agents, models, and ML systems.