Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About the role

Beacon is an AI transformation company that owns vertical market software businesses and is rebuilding how they run and grow on one AI-native operating platform. Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) sit inside pods with the vertical's product leader, own the customer, land the platform in real portfolio company workflows, and bring each company's problems back to the platform. This role leads the FDE function: owning people, doctrine, capacity allocation across pods, and the key metric of labor per portfolio company falling each quarter while deployments get faster.

Responsibilities

• Define and enforce the FDE doctrine: ensure every engagement is scoped as a wedge with a written start, end, and deliverable; each deployment owes the platform a primitive, playbook, or agent workflow whose outcomes the platform can observe; each engagement leaves the portfolio company's engineers more capable.
• Detect when work is sliding toward one‑off code and reshape it into platform‑building work.
• Allocate capacity across pods: decide with pod product leaders where the roughly 1,000 engineering weeks per year go — named capacity on anchors where revenue and transferable proof align, time‑boxed and capped bets whose value is the evidence they produce, instrumentation on cash engines, and nothing discretionary on the rest.
• Ensure every FDE item passes four gates before allocation: a business outcome in a number, an owner at the portfolio company who wants it, a baseline we can already see, and a stack we can ship this quarter.
• Maintain the pod partnership: each vertical runs a prioritized 1–N backlog, re‑ranked weekly by the pod product leader and the FDE; you bring technical sequencing and what each deployment owes the platform, making the mechanism real in every pod so no FDE sets their own goals and no work is invisible to the pod.
• Serve as the intake for patterns from the field and the strongest voice on what the platform rails are missing; turn similar code emerging at two portfolio companies into shared primitives, and ship workflows a GM would notice if switched off to the rest of the vertical.
• Build and lead the team: hire senior generalists in Toronto and San Francisco, grow them, and hold the bar of demonstrated upleveling of others; act as player‑coach by carrying one hard deployment yourself in the first two quarters.

Requirements

• Built and led a forward‑deployed, solutions, or embedded engineering function at a company where the product was an AI or data platform; you have run the transition from “every engineer sets their own goals” to a team with a shared backlog and shared standard without losing people.
• Remain a strong generalist engineer: comfortable in someone else’s codebase within a day and have shipped LLM‑native software in production with evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking.
• Ability to review an FDE’s wedge and know whether it will compound.
• Operator instincts: read a P&L, understand why a churn‑save beats a feature launch this quarter, and sit across from a GM whose incentives are EBITDA‑driven to land a deployment that borrows from the present to pay for the future.
• Allocates ruthlessly and communicates plainly; you have told a real business with a real GM that it is not where scarce engineering goes this quarter, kept the relationship, and been right.
• Writes clearly and works transparently: async, in public channels, decisions documented where anyone can find them; you understand that the wedge memo, GM update, and post‑deployment retro are the work.

Skills

• LLM‑native software development, including evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking.
• Code review and wedge assessment to determine compounding impact.
• Financial literacy: P&L analysis, EBITDA‑driven decision making.
• Capacity planning and allocation across multiple pods (≈1,000 engineering weeks/year).
• Technical sequencing and backlog prioritization with product leaders.
• Identifying shared primitives and workflows across portfolio companies.
• People leadership: hiring senior generalists, coaching, upleveling teammates.
• Clear written communication and transparent decision‑making in async, public channels.