Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

New York Cityfull timeRemote

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senior

$282k–$355k

H1B: no

Mesh Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Mesh leads and scales the Forward Deployed Engineering organization, embedding senior engineers with strategic partners. The role involves defining operating models, hiring senior engineers, and owning delivery at key accounts.

Responsibilities

Build and scale the FDE organization
Define the operating model: engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar
Hire at least 2-3 senior and staff-level generalists this year placed close to the partner engineering team and timezone they support
Be open to running the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team
Own delivery at our most strategic accounts
Be the person a partner's VP of Engineering or CTO calls — run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans
Assign named owners, not a rotating pool: one engineer or small pod per account, with a mapped executive sponsor
Own the qualification bar. FDE is justified when integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to the next ten partners
Set the boundary with Customer Success, who own the relationship, and Support, who own break-fix. CS flags what an account needs; you decide whether it's an FDE build, a platform ask, or neither
Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production — not tickets closed
Shape product and platform strategy
Turn the sharpest signal in the company — what partners need in production — into scoped, prioritized platform input

Qualification

Leadership and team building10+ years in technical rolesA track record of attractingTechnical credibilitySubstantial experience with brokerCommercial and strategic acumenClient-facing instinctsWillingness to push back

Required

Leadership and team building
10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company
A track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates
Technical credibility
You came up as a strong backend or integrations engineer and can still read a codebase, whiteboard a system, debug a design, and review architecture alongside your team. You are not expected to be in the codebase day to day
Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails. Our partners' engineers will spot someone learning the domain on the job in the first meeting
A history of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production
Commercial and strategic acumen
Strong executive presence — effective and composed in front of partner executives and our own leadership team, including when an integration is on fire
Client-facing instincts: you like being in front of partners, can read a room, and can separate the stated ask from the real constraint
Willingness to push back. You've declined bad requests from partners and internal stakeholders alike, and driven alignment across engineering, revenue, and product without escalating every disagreement