Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Actively

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 170,000 - 200,000

Full time

14 days+

Get more replies from employers

Send a job-specific resume in minutes.

Benefits offered by this job

Health Coverage

Dental Coverage

Vision Coverage

Unlimited PTO

Recharge Days

Catered Lunch on Tue & Fri

Dinners every day

Fully Stocked Kitchen

Cutting-Edge Tech & Tools

Annual Off-sites & Monthly Events

Commuter Benefits

Cozy Office in NYC

Job summary

Actively AI is hiring a player-coach to lead and grow the FDE deployments team. You will personally own our most strategic deployments, hire and mentor, and build playbooks and tooling to scale the motion dramatically.

The role blends data work, customer calls, and shipping code, with the rest focused on improving the team and processes. You’ll operate as an IC and engineering manager, shaping deployments, velocity, and customer outcomes, while driving product improvements and internal tooling

Qualifications

5+ years of experience in FDE, Solutions Engineering, customer-facing Data Science, or as a founder/early operator.
Experience mentoring others or leading teams.
Owned end-to-end customer delivery at hyper-growth startups or top tech companies.
Bonus: built playbooks, internal tooling, or onboarding systems.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow the FDE engagements, owning our most strategic deployments.
Hire, mentor, and build playbooks and tooling to scale the function 5–10x.
Be hands-on in data work, customer calls, and code delivery about half the time.
Shift artisanal work into repeatable systems and processes.

Skills

Python

SQL

ML fundamentals

Hands-on customer work

Player-coach

Leadership

Tools

Internal tooling

Playbooks

Job description

About Actively AI

Actively AI is defining a new category: Intelligence-Led Revenue.

Revenue organizations have always been bottlenecked on human capacity. Reps triage which accounts get attention. Context disappears at every handoff. On any given day, the vast majority of accounts have exactly zero people thinking about them.

Actively addresses this at the structural level. Our platform deploys Per-Account AgentsTM across our customers’ TAM, working 24/7 to research, identify opportunities, and advance next steps without being asked. Leading enterprises including Ramp, Ironclad, and Samsara are already making this shift.

Our co-founders are former Stanford AI researchers, and the team comes from Harvard, CMU, Berkeley, Brex, Scale AI, and Google. We've raised $68M from TCV, First Harmonic, Bain Capital Ventures, First Round Capital, and more.

About the Role

We're extremely hands-on with customers. Onboarding involves data integration (connecting to their Salesforce, transforming their data into our standardized format), configuration, often a 1-month pilot where we iterate to prove ROI, and ongoing iteration post-conversion. We run discovery to deeply understand each customer’s business, build product capabilities tailored to their workflows, and explore new use cases alongside them.

This has been working great, with a high conversion rate from qualified pilot to paying customer, and we typically pay for ourselves multiple times over in the pilot alone. But it takes serious hands-on work, and today our small, mighty, and growing FDE team is running these engagements.

We're looking for a player-coach to lead and grow this function. You'll personally own our most strategic deployments while hiring, mentoring, and building the playbooks and tooling that let us scale this motion 5-10x.

This is explicitly not a hands-off management role. You'll be in the data, on customer calls, and shipping code roughly half your time. The other half is making everyone around you better and turning artisanal work into a repeatable system.

Day in the Life

You’ll operate as a blend of:

An FDE – personally leading 1-2 strategic deployments so you can coach credibly and feel what your team feels
An engineering manager – hiring, coaching, and setting the bar for technical and customer excellence
A founder – extreme ownership over deployment velocity, customer outcomes, and team health
A PM – turning patterns from deployments into product defaults and internal tooling, so each deployment is easier than the last
A GTM partner – shaping which customers we take on, how pilots are scoped, and how we hand off to long-term success

Who You Are

You’ve done the IC job and were great at it. Former FDE, Solutions Engineer, embedded Data Scientist, or founder-operator who personally onboarded early customers. Strong Python and SQL, ML fundamentals, real interest or experience with LLMs.
Player-coach by temperament, not just title. You don't see coding as something you've graduated from, and you don't see management as paperwork.
Detail-oriented at scale. You can hold the texture of several deployments in your head at once and know which details actually matter.
High ownership and ambition. Pragmatic, ships quickly, excited to own a top-three company priority.
Loves customers and loves talent. You can sit in a customer's pain, translate it to their real problem, and turn it into a product improvement. You also have a track record of attracting strong people and helping them grow.
High slope. Learns fast, knows how you learn best, expects the same of the team you build.

Ideally:

5+ years of experience, much of it in FDE, Solutions Engineering, customer-facing Data Science, or as a founder/early operator
Prior experience leading or mentoring others
Owned end-to-end customer delivery at a hyper-growth startup or top tech company
Bonus: built playbooks, internal tooling, or onboarding systems that outlasted you

Actively AI provides an estimate of the compensation for roles that may be hired as required by state regulations. Compensation may vary based on (a) location, as Actively AI factors in specific location when benchmarking compensation for most roles; (b) individual candidate skills and qualifications; and (c) individual candidate experience. Additionally, Actively AI leverages current market data to determine compensation, so posted compensation figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Actively.ai reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law. Actively AI is committed to equal treatment and opportunity in all aspects of recruitment, selection, and employment without regard to gender, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other category protected under the law. Actively AI is an equal opportunity employer; committed to a community of inclusion, and an environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

Compensation Range: : $170,000 USD - $200,000 USD

Why Join

At Actively, you write playbooks rather than follow them. You own outcomes, not just tasks, and see directly how your work changes what customers can do — across a product and go-to-market motion that is scaling fast.

The team is high-caliber and low-ego: people who work from first principles, move with urgency, and care deeply about building something that drives real value. If that's the kind of challenge you're looking for, Actively is the right place.

Benefits