Head of Deployment

Role Overview

As Head of Deployment, you’ll build and lead the team that sits closest to Serval’s customers — where product meets reality. You’ll own how we deploy Serval’s AI platform into complex IT environments, ensuring customers realize immediate value while feeding critical insights back into product and engineering.

You’ll start as a hands-on technical leader — writing code, leading high-stakes pilots, and designing scalable onboarding processes — then grow a team of forward deployed engineers who blend software engineering, customer empathy, and systems thinking.

This role is ideal for someone who’s operated at the intersection of engineering and customer success, thrives in ambiguity, and loves building zero-to-one technical teams in high-growth, AI-native startups.

What You’ll Do

• Build and lead the Deployed Software Engineering function, defining its charter, processes, and hiring plan.
• Own customer implementations and pilots, ensuring rapid, reliable value delivery for strategic accounts.
• Write production-quality code to extend Serval’s platform, integrate APIs, and solve unique customer challenges.
• Develop reusable onboarding frameworks, turning bespoke deployments into repeatable, scalable patterns.
• Partner with Product & Engineering to translate field learnings into roadmap priorities and platform improvements.
• Act as a trusted advisor to customers’ IT and Security leaders, guiding them through automation design and rollout.
• Drive technical strategy for migrations, integrations, and long-term account success.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop a world-class team of forward deployed engineers who embody Serval’s pace and precision.
• Establish metrics and systems to track deployment velocity, adoption, and satisfaction across accounts.

What You’ll Need

• 7–10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years leading technical or customer-facing teams.
• Proven track record of building and scaling Software Engineering teams in a fast-paced SaaS or AI environment.
• Strong technical foundation — capable of reading and writing production code, building APIs, and debugging distributed systems.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers on deployments, integrations, and architecture design.
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate between technical and executive audiences.
• Builder’s mindset: thrives in ambiguity, moves fast, and creates process where none exists.
• Deep customer empathy and the ability to balance short-term needs with long-term platform evolution.

Nice to Have

• Prior startup experience as an early technical or engineering leader.
• Knowledge of IT, Security, or workflow automation domains.
• Comfort working with LLM-based or AI agent systems in production.
• Strong opinions on how “agentic” deployment teams should operate and measure success.