Director, Forward Deployed Engineering — Enterprise ML

Chalk; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Lunch and dinner provided

Uber/Lyft home

Team building events

15 PTO days + 14 holidays

Job summary

Chalk is building a data platform for ML applications and is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer leader. You will own the strategy, hiring, and execution of customer engagements from pre-sales pilots to onboarding and expansion.

This is a high-impact role reporting directly to founders and shaping the FDE function as Chalk grows. You will lead a team across New York and San Francisco, partner with Sales and Engineering, and stay hands-on to ensure successful customer outcomes in regulated

Qualifications

• 10+ years engineering experience with 3+ years leading customer-facing teams.
• Strong hands-on Python and SQL skills and ability to dive into customer architectures.
• Experience across pre-sales and post-sales enterprise motions including pilots, onboarding, support and expansion.

Responsibilities

• Lead and retain Chalk's Forward Deployed Engineers across New York and San Francisco; drive aggressive hiring.
• Define strategy and operating model for FDE; engagement models, account coverage, pre-sales/post-sales balance.
• Own systems for the team: triage, rotations, escalation paths, onboarding playbooks, and rollout processes.
• Partner with Sales and GTM on technical pilots, evaluations, and strategy behind key deals.
• Collaborate with Engineering to feed customer learnings into the product roadmap and tooling.
• Stay hands-on with customer architectures and unblock hard technical problems.
• Serve as executive-level technical counterpart to customer leadership at top accounts.
• Define career paths and grow the FDE function as Chalk scales.

Skills

Python

SQL

Leadership

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Job description

Chalk is building a data platform for ML applications and is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer leader. You will own the strategy, hiring, and execution of customer engagements from pre-sales pilots to onboarding and expansion.

This is a high-impact role reporting directly to founders and shaping the FDE function as Chalk grows. You will lead a team across New York and San Francisco, partner with Sales and Engineering, and stay hands-on to ensure successful customer outcomes in regulated