Director, Forward-Deployed AI Engineering

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Scale AI is seeking a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to oversee delivery for our largest enterprise accounts. You will lead a world-class team embedding with Fortune 500 customers, owning agent design, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure to production readiness.

You will partner with Forward Deployed, Product and Platform teams to ship efficiently, codify repeatable patterns, and translate field insights into actionable product roadmaps with measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering or technical delivery experience, including leadership of customer-facing teams.
• 3+ years leading high-performing customer-facing engineering teams (Forward Deployed, Solutions Engineering, Applied AI, or similar).
• Hands-on fluency with the full AI stack, including LLMs, agents, backends and cloud infra. Evidence of scaling delivery and turning field work into product leverage.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery for our largest accounts across end-to-end engagements.
• Lead and grow the Forward Deployed Engineering team with hiring standards and onboarding.
• Provide holistic technical oversight across agents, models, backends, data pipelines and cloud infra.
• Collaborate with Product and Platform to codify patterns into reusable platform capabilities and playbooks.
• Engage with Fortune 500 customers’ leadership and translate business problems into measurable technical roadmaps.
• Enforce production excellence across reliability, security, observability and evaluation.
• Drive feedback from field work into product and research roadmaps.
• Operate with founder mindset and high autonomy under pressure.

Skills

10+ years of software engineering or/​

3+ years leading customer-facing teams

Hands-on AI stack fluency

Executive-level communication

Tools

Python

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

MongoDB

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

Docker

IaC tooling

Job description

Scale AI is seeking a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to oversee delivery for our largest enterprise accounts. You will lead a world-class team embedding with Fortune 500 customers, owning agent design, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure to production readiness.

You will partner with Forward Deployed, Product and Platform teams to ship efficiently, codify repeatable patterns, and translate field insights into actionable product roadmaps with measurable outcomes.