Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

ten8labs; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team ESOPs

Budget for courses and certifications

Job summary

ten8labs is seeking the most senior engineering hire to lead its forward-deployed practice in Gurugram. You will own client relationships at leadership level, set technical direction across engagements, and grow a team of senior and entry-level FDEs while still building the toughest components yourself.

You will shape what we sell, how we price it, who we hire, and how we deliver. The role demands deep hands-on software, ML and cloud proficiency, proven leadership, and the ability to operate

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software, ML, or solutions engineering, with client-embedded or forward-deployed experience.
• Led AI or data systems from scoping to production in real businesses.
• Experience hiring and growing engineering teams.
• Strong communication with client leadership, including in Hindi.

Responsibilities

• Own client outcomes. Be the senior technical partner to the client's owner or leadership; agree success measures up front and answer for them
• Shape the work we take on. Run discovery for new clients, decide what is worth building, and turn it into a scoped, priced proposal with the founders
• Set technical direction. Define the reference architecture, model and vendor choices, security and data-handling standards, and evaluation practice used across all engagements
• Build the hard parts. Lead the first prototype on new engagements and step in on the most difficult integrations and deployments
• Run delivery across engagements. Oversee three to five engagements at once through senior FDEs; review designs, unblock teams and protect quality
• Hire and grow the team. Define the FDE hiring bar, run the decomposition and deployment interviews, and coach senior and entry-level FDEs
• Productize what we learn. Turn repeated work into a reusable library, playbooks and accelerators, and feed field patterns into ten8brain and future products
• Grow the business. Act as technical lead in sales conversations, find follow-on work inside existing clients, and help shape partnerships

Skills

Python

Cloud architecture

APIs & enterprise integration

LLM knowledge

Team leadership

Hindi communication

Job description

You will build and run ten8labs' forward-deployed practice with the founders. You own the client relationship at the leadership level, set the technical direction across every engagement, and grow a team of senior and entry-level FDEs. You still build: you take the hardest problems and the first weeks of every new engagement yourself.

This is the most senior engineering hire in the practice. You will shape what we sell, how we price it, who we hire and how we deliver.

What you'll do

• Own client outcomes. Be the senior technical partner to the client's owner or leadership; agree success measures up front and answer for them
• Shape the work we take on. Run discovery for new clients, decide what is worth building, and turn it into a scoped, priced proposal with the founders
• Set technical direction. Define the reference architecture, model and vendor choices, security and data-handling standards, and evaluation practice used across all engagements
• Build the hard parts. Lead the first prototype on new engagements and step in on the most difficult integrations and deployments
• Run delivery across engagements. Oversee three to five engagements at once through senior FDEs; review designs, unblock teams and protect quality
• Hire and grow the team. Define the FDE hiring bar, run the decomposition and deployment interviews, and coach senior and entry-level FDEs
• Productize what we learn. Turn repeated work into a reusable library, playbooks and accelerators, and feed field patterns into ten8brain and future products
• Grow the business. Act as technical lead in sales conversations, find follow-on work inside existing clients, and help shape partnerships

What you need

• 8+ years in software, ML or solutions engineering, with at least 3 in customer-embedded, consulting or forward-deployed roles
• A track record of leading several AI or data systems from scoping to production in real businesses, with results you can quantify
• Experience leading engineers: hiring, reviewing work and growing people
• Deep hands-on skill in Python, cloud architecture (AWS, Azure or GCP), APIs and enterprise integration
• Expert applied LLM knowledge: RAG, agents and agent frameworks, evaluation, guardrails, and cost, latency and accuracy trade-offs
• Commercial judgment: you have scoped and estimated work, handled a difficult client, and walked away from a bad project
• Clear communication with business owners, including in Hindi

Nice to have

• You have built or scaled a services, consulting or FDE practice before
• Deployments in regulated or constrained settings: BFSI, healthcare, manufacturing, on-premises or private cloud
• Self-hosted model serving and open-weight models
• A founder or early-startup background
• Experience selling to Indian mid-market businesses

How we'll measure success

In 3 months

You have led a new client from discovery to production go-live and written the first version of our delivery playbook

In 6 months

Three or more engagements run on your standards, and you have hired at least two FDEs

In 12 months

The practice delivers repeatably without the founders on every project, and reusable assets shorten new engagements measurably

About ten8labs

ten8labs puts AI into production inside Indian and USA businesses. We are a deep-tech AI product lab with offices in Gurugram and Austin, Texas, and we work forward-deployed: our engineers sit with the client, find the work worth automating, build it into their real systems, and stay until people use it every day.

Most AI projects in Indian mid-market companies stall between the demo and daily use. The data lives in spreadsheets, ERPs and communication threads. Our forward deployed engineers close that gap.

We also build our own product, ten8brain, a risk intelligence platform. What we learn in the field shapes it, and engineers who join now help define how the practice works.

What we offer everyone on the team

• Real ownership from week one: your work ships into a client's business, not a backlog
• Exposure to many industries and problems in your first year
• Founding-team ESOPs
• Direct work with the founders on scoping, delivery and product
• A budget for courses, model credits and certifications