Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a founding Leader for Forward Deployed Engineering to scale enterprise AI deployments with Claude. You will hire and mentor a high-performing team, set standards for customer engagements, and build repeatable playbooks to drive measurable impact.

You’ll collaborate with Sales, Product, and Engineering to translate field insights into product direction while maintaining a strong hands-on presence when needed.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or a technical customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering or consulting.
• 2+ years of people management experience within a services/post-sales/FDE organization with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
• Experience building organizations from 0→1, not just inheriting an existing one.
• Executive presence with the ability to move fluidly between strategic conversations with senior stakeholders and hands-on debugging sessions with engineers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; translate technical complexity into clear narratives.

Responsibilities

• Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers; set a high bar for talent and customer instincts.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and invest in career growth of each team member.
• Staff and oversee customer engagements across your team's portfolio, balancing customer needs, team development, and business priorities.
• Collaborate with account teams and Engagement Managers during pre-sales to qualify engagements and scope work.
• Review architectures and code, ensuring high-quality, production-ready solutions.
• Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions and prototype solutions.
• Build repeatable playbooks and internal knowledge bases to capture field learnings.
• Define team OKRs tied to customer success and product adoption.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field insights into product improvements.
• Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%).

Skills

Software engineering

Solutions architecture

Forward deployed engineering

Consulting

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

the company is building the Applied AI team to help the world's most ambitious organizations adopt Claude in ways that are transformative, safe, and lasting. Our Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with strategic customers to ship production AI applications that solve real business problems. As this practice grows, we need a founding leader to build and scale it.

As the first FDE Manager, you'll own the team that sits at the frontier of enterprise AI deployment. You'll hire and develop a high-performing team of FDEs, set the technical and operational bar for customer engagements, and build the playbooks that turn one-off successes into repeatable patterns. You'll work hand-in-hand with Engagement Managers who own delivery logistics and stakeholder management, while you ensure your team is shipping quality code, growing technically, and representing the company at the highest level in customer environments.

This is a player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership. You'll stay close enough to the technical work to review architectures, debug production issues, and pair with your team when it matters — but your primary impact will come from the people you hire, the standards you set, and the culture you create. You'll partner cross-functionally with Sales, Product, and Engineering to shape how the company serves its most strategic customers, and your team's field insights will directly influence product direction.

This role requires someone who thrives in ambiguity and is energized by building from zero to one. You'll be defining what good looks like for FDE management at the company — there is no existing playbook to follow.

Responsibilities

• Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set a high bar for technical talent and customer instincts.

• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and invest in the career growth of each team member. Create an environment where FDEs do the best work of their careers.

• Staff and oversee customer engagements across your team's portfolio, making resource allocation decisions that balance customer needs, team development, and business priorities.

• Collaborate with account teams and Engagement Managers during the pre-sales process to qualify engagements, scope work, and inform statements of work.

• Review technical architectures and code produced by your FDEs, ensuring the team ships high-quality, production-ready solutions that solve real customer problems.

• Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions, prototype solutions, and debug complex issues alongside your team when needed.

• Build repeatable playbooks, starter repositories, integration templates, and an internal knowledge base that captures what your team learns in the field.

• Define team OKRs that tie to customer success outcomes and product adoption goals. Create operational cadences — standups, retros, engagement reviews — that keep the team aligned.

• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field insights into product improvements. Serve as the voice of the customer in internal planning.

• Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%), particularly during engagement kickoffs and for your team's highest-priority accounts.

You may be a good fit if you have

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or a technical customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering or consulting.

• 2+ years of people management experience within a services/post-sales/FDE organization with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.

• Experience building organizations from 0->1,not just inheriting an existing one.

• Experience working directly with enterprise customers on technical implementations, including comfort navigating complex organizational dynamics.

• Executive presence with the ability to move fluidly between strategic conversations with senior stakeholders and hands-on debugging sessions with engineers.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills. You can translate technical complexity into clear narratives for diverse audiences.

• Genuine excitement about building something new and defining what great looks like for a team that doesn't yet exist.

Why this role matters

You'll be a founding leader of a team that defines how enterprises adopt and scale AI. Your work will directly influence the company's product direction, create reusable patterns for the broader customer base, and establish the company as the trusted partner for AI transformation — all while advancing the responsible development of frontier AI systems.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary: £1—£1 GBP

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to the company, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

the company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.