Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

About the Role

We are looking for a senior technical leader to build and lead a Forward Deployed Engineering function within an AI-focused software organisation. The role sits at the intersection of engineering, product and customer delivery. You will lead a team of senior generalist engineers who work directly with business and product leaders to deploy AI-enabled technology into real operating environments, while feeding the lessons from those deployments back into the core platform. You will own the function's operating model, including how engineers are deployed, how work is prioritised, how teams are developed, and how successful solutions become reusable products rather than one-off implementations. This is a player-coach role. You will lead the function while staying close enough to the technical work to contribute personally to complex deployments. What You'll Do - Define and establish the operating model for a forward-deployed engineering function, ensuring engineers remain focused on delivering measurable outcomes rather than traditional consulting work. - Set clear standards for deployments, including defined scope, measurable outcomes, ownership and delivery timelines. - Ensure lessons from customer deployments are translated into reusable software, technical primitives, playbooks or agent workflows. - Allocate engineering capacity across multiple business units and competing priorities based on expected business impact, evidence and delivery feasibility. - Partner closely with product and business leaders to maintain a prioritised backlog and align technical sequencing with commercial priorities. - Identify recurring problems across deployments and determine when they should become shared platform capabilities. - Hire, develop and retain senior generalist engineers across the team's locations. - Build a culture of strong ownership, transparent communication and documented decision-making. - Lead by example as a player-coach, personally taking ownership of a complex deployment during the first two quarters.

Requirements

• •You have built and led a forward-deployed, solutions or embedded engineering function within an AI or data platform environment.
• •You have successfully moved a team from individually defined engineering goals towards a shared backlog, common standards and collective accountability.
• •You remain a strong generalist engineer and can become productive quickly in an unfamiliar codebase.
• •You have shipped LLM-native software in production and have experience with evaluation, autonomy controls and measuring outcomes.
• •You can assess a technical deployment opportunity and determine whether it is likely to create lasting and reusable value.
• •You have strong operator instincts and understand how engineering decisions connect to commercial outcomes.
• •You are comfortable making difficult resource-allocation decisions across competing business priorities.
• •You can work effectively with senior business leaders and communicate difficult prioritisation decisions clearly.
• •You write clearly and work transparently, including through asynchronous communication and documented decisions.
• •You are comfortable operating with significant autonomy in an environment where priorities can change quickly.