Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
ID.me is the next-generation digital identity wallet that simplifies how individuals securely prove their identity online. Consumers can verify their identity with ID.me once and seamlessly login across websites without creating a new login or verifying their identity again. Over 152 million users experience streamlined login and identity verification with ID.me at 20 federal agencies, 45 state government agencies, and 70+ healthcare organizations. More than 600+ consumer brands use ID.me to verify communities and user segments. ID.me’s technology meets federal standards for consumer authentication and is approved as a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service provider.
About The Role
ID.me is looking for a Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering to sit within Product Operations and act as the connective tissue between our customers, our product team, and engineering. This role owns a small team of forward-deployed engineers who embed directly with customers, diagnose real-world integration challenges, and translate what they learn into clear, structured input the product ontology and engineering teams can act on. You'll be equally comfortable in a customer war room and in a backlog-grooming session — someone who can build trust with a customer's technical stakeholders one hour and prioritize your team's next two sprints the next.
Responsibilities
- Customer problem communication
- Serve as the primary translator between customers and ID.me's product ontology and engineering teams — turning ambiguous, in-the-field customer problems into precise technical requirements, data model implications, and well-scoped engineering asks.
- Document and route customer-reported issues, edge cases, and feature gaps so product ontology and engineering have the context they need without having to talk to the customer directly.
- Build repeatable processes (templates, intake forms, escalation paths) that keep customer problems from getting lost or garbled between teams.
- Team leadership and prioritization
- Manage and grow a team of forward deployed engineers, setting clear goals and providing technical and career mentorship.
- Build, maintain, and prioritize the team's backlog of customer-driven work, balancing urgent customer needs against long-term platform and ontology investments.
- Partner with Product Operations and Engineering leadership to align FDE work with broader roadmap and capacity planning.
- Establish metrics to track team throughput, customer impact, and time-to-resolution, and use them to continuously improve how the team operates.
- Customer relationships
- Build durable, trusted relationships with customer technical and business stakeholders, acting as a face of ID.me during implementation, expansion, and escalation moments.
- Travel on-site or join deep working sessions with customers as needed to understand their environment firsthand.
- Represent the voice of the customer internally, and represent ID.me's technical roadmap and constraints externally, in a way that keeps both sides aligned.
Requirements
- 5+ years in a customer-facing engineering role (forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, or implementation engineering), with 2+ years managing engineers.
- Track record of translating messy, real-world customer problems into clear technical specs that engineering and data/ontology teams can execute against.
- Experience building and prioritizing a backlog for a small team under competing customer deadlines.
- Strong technical fluency — comfortable reading API docs, discussing data models, and troubleshooting integrations alongside engineers, without needing to write production code day-to-day.
- Excellent relationship-building skills with both technical and non-technical customer stakeholders, including at the executive level.
- Clear, structured written and verbal communication; comfortable being the bridge in a room full of people who don't naturally speak the same language.
Nice to Have
- Background in identity proofing, fraud, or data/knowledge graph and ontology systems.
- Prior experience at a high-growth B2B SaaS or platform company.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Health savings account and flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts).
- Basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance.
- 401(k) with company match.
- Parental leave.
- Unlimited paid time off, including 8 company-wide holidays.
- Short and long-term disability insurance.
- Accident and critical illness insurance.
- Referral bonus policy.
- Employee assistance program.
- Pet insurance.
- Travel assistant program.
- Wellbeing and childcare discounts.
- Benefit advocates.
- Learning and development benefit.
Pay
Mountain View, CA Pay Range: $188,000—$275,000 USD
Final offers may vary based on qualifications, professional experiences, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location, and other job-related factors.
Schedule
ID.me is a full-time, in-office culture. Unless a specific job description explicitly states otherwise, all roles are on-site five days per week at one of our offices in McLean, VA; Mountain View, CA; New York City, NY; or Tampa, FL. Certain roles — such as field-based sales or other remote-by-design positions — may have different work arrangements as noted in their individual postings.