Chief, Forward-Deployed Engineering

Tradermath; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 282,000 - 355,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Unlimited PTO

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Mesh is seeking a leader to build and scale Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), embedding with exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets. Reporting to the CTO, you’ll own a small, capable team and drive end-to-end integrations with key partners in New York City or San Francisco.

The role blends technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership, requiring you to earn credibility with partner engineers, scope live integrations, and guide architecture decisions while growing

Qualifications

• 10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams.
• Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company.
• Track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates.

Responsibilities

• Define the operating model: engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar.
• Hire at least 2-3 senior and staff-level generalists this year placed close to the partner engineering team and timezone they support.
• Be open to running the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team.
• Be the person a partner's VP of Engineering or CTO calls — run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans.
• Assign named owners, not a rotating pool: one engineer or small pod per account, with a mapped executive sponsor.
• Own the qualification bar. FDE is justified when integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to the next ten partners.
• Set the boundary with Customer Success, who own the relationship, and Support, who own break-fix.
• Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production — not tickets closed.
• Turn the sharpest signal in the company — what partners need in production — into scoped, prioritized platform input.
• Enforce the productization ratchet: what's built either generalizes into our shared platform inside a defined window, or we stop re-investing in it.
• Build reference architectures, QA, and monitoring that catch failure modes inside the integration rather than in a support queue.

Skills

Leadership

Engineering background

Partner engagement

Platform strategy

Strategic thinking

Job description

Mesh is seeking a leader to build and scale Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), embedding with exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets. Reporting to the CTO, you’ll own a small, capable team and drive end-to-end integrations with key partners in New York City or San Francisco.

The role blends technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership, requiring you to earn credibility with partner engineers, scope live integrations, and guide architecture decisions while growing