Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

We’re looking for a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead the team responsible for helping our most strategic enterprise customers operationalize Replit inside their organizations. Reporting to the President and Head of AI, you’ll lead a team operating at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer transformation.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the FDE organization
• Hire and develop a high-talent-density team of Forward Deployed Engineers
• Define the hiring bar, operating principles, and execution standards for the organization
• Create a team culture centered around speed, ownership, pragmatism, and customer impact
• Create systems and tooling that allow the team to scale without becoming process-heavy
• Work directly with strategic customers
• Partner with engineering leaders, product teams, and executives at some of Replit’s largest enterprise customers
• Help customers redesign workflows around AI-native software development
• Unblock high-stakes deployments and help customers move from experimentation to production adoption
• Build production systems
• Lead teams building real applications and workflows directly inside customer environments
• Drive rapid prototyping and iteration cycles with customers
• Jump into architecture reviews, debugging sessions, implementation strategy, or live builds when needed
• Influence product and platform direction
• Identify repeatable customer implementation patterns and turn them into reusable platform capabilities
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to upstream learnings from customer deployments into the core platform
• Contribute production-ready code, tooling, integrations, and reference architectures that improve enterprise adoption at scale
• Create tight feedback loops between customer environments and Replit’s internal product development teams
• Drive business impact
• Improve customer adoption, expansion, retention, and deployment velocity
• Act as an executive escalation point for critical customer situations
• Help define how Replit scales enterprise adoption globally

Required Skills And Experience

• 12+ years of experience in engineering, infrastructure, developer tools, applied AI, or customer engineering environments
• Experience leading Forward Deployed Engineering, Applied AI, Solutions Architecture, or Strategic Engineering teams
• Deep curiosity around AI-native software development and strong instincts for how AI changes engineering workflows
• Experience leading high-performing technical organizations
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to operate credibly with senior engineers and executives
• Experience building and shipping production systems in fast-moving environments
• Strong product instincts and systems thinking
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal process
• Excellent communication and customer leadership skills
• Strong sense of ownership and urgency

Nice to have

• Experience with AI agents, LLM workflows, or developer tooling platforms
• Experience supporting Fortune 500 engineering organizations
• Startup or founder experience
• Experience working closely with Product organizations to shape roadmap direction