Director of Forward-Deployed ML Engineering

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Chalk is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer Leader to own strategy for customer engagements and scale the FDE function. You will hire, build playbooks, run pilots from pre-sales to onboarding, and partner with Sales and Engineering to shape the roadmap while staying hands-on with architectures.

You will define careers, establish processes, and ensure the team delivers deeply technical engagements at enterprise scale, with a focus on growth and customer value.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 3+ years leading customer-facing engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and retain Chalk's team of Forward Deployed Engineers across New York and San Francisco, and own an aggressive hiring plan as the team scales.
• Define the strategy and operating model for the FDE function: engagement models, account coverage, the pre-sales/post-sales balance, and how FDEs drive expansion within accounts.
• Own the systems that make the team run - support triage and rotations, escalation paths to Engineering, onboarding playbooks, and the processes for rolling out platform changes to customer environments.
• Partner closely with Sales and GTM leadership on technical pilots, evaluations, and the technical strategy behind our most important deals.
• Partner with Engineering leadership to channel customer learnings into the product roadmap and to sharpen the internal tooling FDEs rely on.
• Stay hands-on: dive into customer architectures, unblock hard technical problems, and set the technical bar for the team.
• Serve as an executive-level technical counterpart to customer leadership at our largest accounts.
• Define career paths and growth trajectories for FDEs, and champion the function's identity as we grow - deeply technical engineers embedded with customers, not sales engineering

Skills

Python

SQL

Leadership

Executive-level communication

Startup experience

Pre-sales and post-sales

Customer architectures

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Job description

Chalk is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer Leader to own strategy for customer engagements and scale the FDE function. You will hire, build playbooks, run pilots from pre-sales to onboarding, and partner with Sales and Engineering to shape the roadmap while staying hands-on with architectures.

You will define careers, establish processes, and ensure the team delivers deeply technical engagements at enterprise scale, with a focus on growth and customer value.