Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Job summary

Responsibilities

The FDE Manager leads and grows the team of Forward Deployed Engineers who own the high-level technical side of our customer data programs. FDEs scope tasks, design the pipelines and measurement that turn a customer's goal into a training signal, write the instructions that guide Alignerrs, and…

• Lead the FDE team end-to-end: hire, coach, manage performance, and develop careers across the FDE track and toward FDR or GM.
• Own the supply side of FDE staffing: commit FDEs to the staffing cadence and match them to projects by skill and development need, balancing each FDE's preferred vertical with…
• Set and uphold the craft bar: sharp task scoping, sound pipeline and measurement design (including the LLM-as-judge and quality instrumentation that surface problems early)…
• Protect FDE focus: keep day-to-day project operations with the SPLs and Pod Leads, and keep FDEs on scoping, technical depth, and what the customer needs from the data.
• Own FDE onboarding and the bar that certifies a new FDE as ready to be staffed: define which projects are eligible to onboard on, maintain the instruction and Loom repository…

What they're looking for

• A strong forward-deployed / FDE background, or significant experience managing technical or delivery people — and readiness to be a hands-on, player-coach manager.
• Strong technical fluency in our domain: enough depth in frontier-data work, RL environments, data pipelines, and quality/evaluation to coach credibly on scoping, pipelines, judge…
• Excellent judgment on what makes data genuinely useful to a customer — how to translate ambiguous requirements into clear plans, and how to tell whether data will actually move a…
• A track record of developing people and giving direct, useful feedback.
• A high bar for quality paired with the ability to deliver against ambitious timelines.

Tech stack

• Databricks