Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

We are a hybrid company with a focus on in-person collaboration when necessary. Employees are expected to be available to work from one of our office hubs at least two days per week, or eight days per month. Our US hub locations include: Austin, TX; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; and the Washington, DC metro area.

Responsibilities

• Own technical delivery for strategic enterprise accounts.
• Lead FDE engagements end to end—from scoping with customer stakeholders through prototype, production rollout, and handoff to core platform teams.
• Be the bridge between field and platform.
• Turn what you learn in the field into durable platform capability; feed real customer signal back into the roadmap.
• Build and lead a high-trust team.
• Hire, develop, and retain forward-deployed engineers who thrive in customer-facing, high-ambiguity environments.
• Set the bar for technical rigor and customer judgment.
• Move fast without breaking trust.
• Ship prototypes and integrations on aggressive timelines while maintaining security, data-governance, and enterprise-readiness standards.
• Partner across the org.
• Work hand-in-glove with product, sales engineering, security, and platform leadership to unblock deals and de-risk delivery commitments.
• Operate as a technical executive in the room.
• Earn credibility directly with customer engineering and executive stakeholders; represent BetterUp's technical vision in working sessions and escalations.

Requirements

• 12+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years leading engineering teams (manager-of-managers, or a strong senior-IC-to-lead trajectory).
• Track record delivering complex software in customer-facing or forward-deployed settings—FDE, solutions engineering, or professional services with real engineering depth.
• Strong hands-on technical foundation: UI, distributed systems, APIs and integrations, identity and provisioning and other Enterprise requirements.
• Cloud platforms experience (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) a strong plus.
• Demonstrated ability to operate amid ambiguity—taking vague, executive-level asks and producing working software on tight timelines.
• Excellent stakeholder skills: credible with both customer engineers and senior business leaders.
• Sound judgment on enterprise concerns: security, data governance, compliance, and scalability.

Qualifications

• Nice to Have: Experience with composability / configurable-product architectures and group-level governance models.
• Background working with very large enterprise customers (Fortune 100 / regulated industries).
• Experience standing up or scaling an FDE / forward-deployed practice from early stage.
• Exposure to AI-native engineering workflows and agentic tooling.
• AI at BetterUp: Our team thrives at the intersection of human expertise and AI capability. As an AI-forward company, adaptation and continuous learning are part of our daily work.

Skills

• AI fluency as a complement to craft, not a replacement for it.

Benefits

• Access to BetterUp coaching; one for you and one for a friend or family member.
• A competitive compensation plan with opportunity for advancement.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible paid time off.
• All federal/statutory holidays observed.
• 4 BetterUp Inner Workdays.
• 5 Volunteer Days to give back.
• Learning and Development stipend.
• Company wide Summer & Winter breaks.
• Year-round charitable contribution of your choice on behalf of BetterUp.
• 401(k) self contribution.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is as follows: New York City and San Francisco: $264,000 - 330,000 Austin and Arlington: $237,600 - 297,000

Schedule

We are a hybrid company with a focus on in-person collaboration when necessary. Employees are expected to be available to work from one of our office hubs at least two days per week, or eight days per month. Our US hub locations include: Austin, TX; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; and the Washington, DC metro area.