Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

deepset GmbH; Berlin; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Stock options

Annual learning budget

30 days vacation

Team in-person meetups

Mental health support

Dog-friendly HQ

Job summary

deepset GmbH is hiring a Manager to lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team within Customer Engineering. You will cultivate a healthy, high-trust team and ensure delivery of the AI Platform into enterprise and public sector environments, on target and on quality.

You will manage, coach, and grow engineers, oversee RAG pipelines and production deployments, and collaborate with product and engineering to drive scalable patterns and reusable solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI, or infrastructure.
• Strong coaching instincts and capability to build high-trust teams.
• Technical depth in RAG pipelines, cloud deployments, APIs, and security fundamentals.
• Commercial awareness: understand how scope and staffing impact utilization and margins.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the FDE team across Advisory, Builder, Operating, and Support profiles.
• Oversee delivery engine: staffing, architecture reviews, and production readiness to meet delivery targets.
• Collaborate with Delivery Lead, Value Engineers, Product, and Engineering to shape scope and reusable patterns.

Skills

Leadership

Team development

Customer-facing engineering

RAG pipelines

Cloud deployments

Strategic thinking

Tools

LLM platforms

Enterprise deployments

Job description

TL;DR

We’re hiring a Manager to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Customer Engineering. You build a healthy, high-trust team and make sure it delivers deepset’s AI Platform into enterprise and public sector production environments, on target and on quality. You came up close to the work and still go deep when it matters.

Why deepset

At deepset, we’re on a mission to make custom AI solutions accessible to every organization. With Haystack, thousands of developers build advanced LLM applications every day, while our enterprise-ready AI Platform helps companies turn large language models into business value. We’re remote-first, flexible, and built on a culture of trust and ownership. You’ll collaborate with top-tier tech talent, tackle meaningful challenges, and help transform complex AI into solutions that are simple, powerful, and ready for the real world.

What you will do

Lead and Develop the Team

• Own team health and culture across the four FDE profiles (Advisory, Builder, Operating, Support): a safe space where hard questions are welcome and engineers share patterns instead of working in silos.
• Run strong 1:1s and career conversations so every FDE knows where they stand and how to grow.
• Build the hiring and onboarding pipeline for a remote-first, async-heavy team.
• Clear blockers fast, and elevate the ones you can’t resolve before they become delivery risks.

Run the Delivery Engine

• Staff the right FDE profile to the right engagement and deliver against your team’s utilization targets, protecting against both burnout and idle capacity.
• Hold the technical bar: review architecture and solution decisions across RAG pipelines, retrieval quality, deployment topology, and production operations.
• Deliver engagements on scope and on plan, follow our delivery processes, and own resolution of customer escalations.

Collaborate Across the Organization

• Partner with the Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope, feasibility, and staffing, with clear ownership at each handoff.
• Feed field insight to Product and Engineering, and build reusable patterns that reduce custom work.

What you bring to the team

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering, professional services, or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI, or infrastructure.
• Strong coaching instincts: you develop engineers and build high-trust teams.
• Technical depth to hold the bar: RAG (retrieval, embeddings, re-ranking, evaluation), cloud and self-hosted deployments, model optimization, APIs, integrations, and IAM/security fundamentals.
• Commercial awareness: you understand how scope, staffing, and execution affect utilization, revenue, and margin.
• Clear, written and verbal communication with technical and executive audiences, and comfort with ambiguity in a remote-first setup.

Nice to have

• Experience running services or delivery inside a SaaS or platform company navigating the move to enterprise and self-hosted deployments.
• Experience with OKR frameworks and squad-based delivery organizations.
• Familiarity with agent-based systems, LLM platforms, and AI-native engineering tooling-

Benefits

• Remote-first setup with flexible hours & tech of your choice
• 30 days vacation + extra days for family sick leave
• Competitive salary & stock options for every team member
• Monthly sports & mental health support allowance with Oliva
• Annual learning & development budget
• Monthly team socials & in-person meetups
• Dog-friendly Berlin HQ

About us

Founded in 2018, deepset builds open and enterprise-grade tools that help teams build AI with purpose. From Haystack, our open-source framework, to the Haystack Enterprise Platform, we give developers and organizations the building blocks to solve complex, high impact challenges with AI with full control, transparency, and sovereignty. Backed by GV and Balderton, we’re growing the world’s production AI community and customer base solving challenges too critical to get wrong.

Visit us to learn more: deepset Website | Haystack Website | GitHub | Linkedin | X deepset (Twitter) | X haystack (Twitter)