Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

Accrete is seeking a Director, Forward Deployed Engineering to lead the function responsible for making Accrete’s platform work in complex, high-stakes customer environments. This leader will oversee the execution of forward deployed engineering across strategic deployments, ensuring that customer implementations move from discovery and prototype to stable production adoption.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the Forward Deployed Engineering function across strategic customer deployments, ensuring successful execution from technical discovery through production rollout.
• Own planning, staffing, prioritization, and delivery governance for forward deployed engineering engagements.
• Manage and develop FDE team members, including senior individual contributors and team leads as the organization scales.
• Establish repeatable deployment practices, technical standards, playbooks, and operating mechanisms that improve delivery quality and speed.
• Partner with Deployment Strategy to translate customer needs, business workflows, and operational requirements into executable technical delivery plans.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Research to ensure field feedback informs platform capabilities, model improvements, and roadmap priorities.
• Serve as a senior technical leader in strategic customer engagements, including executive-level discussions, technical reviews, and deployment escalation management.
• Ensure deployments are designed for production adoption, measurable workflow impact, security, reliability, and long-term scalability.
• Guide teams through tradeoffs across scope, speed, quality, risk, and customer value.
• Identify delivery risks early and implement corrective actions to protect timelines, quality, and customer trust.
• Support deployments in regulated environments, including environments with complex security and infrastructure constraints.
• Build strong working relationships across internal teams to align commercial priorities, customer outcomes, and product execution.
• Define success metrics for forward deployed engineering, including production adoption, deployment velocity, reusable patterns, customer impact, and team capacity.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, technical delivery, solutions architecture, platform engineering, or related technical functions.
• 5+ years of experience leading engineering or technical delivery teams, preferably in customer-facing, or enterprise customers.
• Proven experience leading complex end-to-end deployments of production software systems.
• Strong technical foundation across full-stack systems, cloud or on-prem infrastructure, data integrations, APIs, and enterprise software delivery.
• Experience with AI, machine learning, LLM, or data-intensive systems, with an understanding of how model behavior affects product experience and customer trust.
• Demonstrated ability to lead broad technical functions through managers, senior ICs, or cross-functional delivery teams.
• Strong executive communication skills and experience partnering with C-level, senior technical, and operational stakeholders.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous environments, make sound tradeoffs, and drive teams toward clear outcomes.
• Experience building operating models, delivery processes, team structures, and technical standards for scaling organizations.
• Strong judgment in balancing customer needs, product direction, security requirements, and engineering quality.
• Ability to travel up to 50% based on customer and deployment needs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience leading Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Field Engineering, Deployment Engineering, or similar teams.
• Familiarity with retrieval systems, knowledge graphs, semantic search, agentic workflows, or enterprise AI platforms.
• Experience scaling a technical services or field engineering function in a high-growth startup environment.