Founding Leader, Forward-Deployed Engineering

Invoca; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Day-One Health Benefits

Paid Holidays

401(k) with company match

Job summary

Invoca is seeking a Founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead a team of engineers embedded in our Go-to-Market motion. You will own the function that turns technical credibility into closed deals and successful onboardings, hiring and coaching FDEs, and prioritizing deals that require engineering support.

This player-coach role emphasizes pipeline influence, customer outcomes, and scalable processes.

Qualifications

• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role
• People management experience, or clear evidence of leadership in a technical, customer-facing capacity
• Strong business judgment - you can tell the difference between a deal worth throwing engineering time at and one that isn't
• Comfort operating at the intersection of Sales, Product, and Engineering, including comfort saying no to stakeholders in any of those functions when priorities conflict
• Track record of turning messy, one-off customer work into repeatable process and reusable assets
• Excellent executive communication - you'll regularly represent this function's impact to sales and company leadership

Responsibilities

• Hire, coach, and manage a team of Forward Deployed Engineers; set the bar for what "great" looks like in a customer-facing technical role
• Triage and prioritize FDE deployment across the deal pipeline - deciding which opportunities and accounts warrant dedicated technical support, and when
• Act as the senior technical escalation point on strategic or at-risk deals and implementations, stepping in personally when the stakes are highest
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success leadership to define where FDEs plug into the sales and onboarding motion, and where the handoffs are
• Build the operating rhythm for the team: how PoCs get scoped, how wins and losses get debriefed, how reusable assets get captured and shared instead of rebuilt every time
• Own the feedback loop from field to product - aggregate what your team is hearing across dozens of deals into a small number of sharp, prioritized asks for product and engineering leadership
• Report on team impact in terms the business cares about: deals influenced, time-to-value for new customers, win rates on technically contested deals
• Manage headcount planning and capacity - knowing when the team needs to grow, and where geographically or by specialization
• Up to 50% on-site with customers - embedded during implementation to build trust and accelerate delivery

Skills

Forward Deployed Engineer

People management

Executive communication

Business judgment

Leadership

Job description

Invoca is seeking a Founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead a team of engineers embedded in our Go-to-Market motion. You will own the function that turns technical credibility into closed deals and successful onboardings, hiring and coaching FDEs, and prioritizing deals that require engineering support.

This player-coach role emphasizes pipeline influence, customer outcomes, and scalable processes.