Head of Forward-Deployed Engineering

Sycamore Labs, Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Growth opportunities

Job summary

Sycamore is seeking a Senior Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead the FDE team in Palo Alto. You’ll guide a small, hands-on group as they work directly with Fortune 500 customers to solve complex problems and deliver production deployments.

You’ll recruit, mentor, and develop engineers, stay hands-on with technical discovery, own enterprise programs from discovery to deployment, and shape how we scale the FDE organization while partnering with engineering, product, and GTM.

Qualifications

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering or forward-deployed teams.
• Strong software engineering background to guide architecture decisions.
• Experience deploying enterprise AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the FDE team and recruit top engineers.
• Stay hands-on with customers and engineers on technical discovery.
• Own complex enterprise engagements from discovery to deployment.
• Be a technical and commercial partner with customer execs.
• Create the FDE playbook with processes and best practices.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and GTM to feed product feedback.
• Define future organization and scaling strategy.

Skills

Team leadership

Customer-facing engineering

Software engineering

AI systems deployment

Communication skills

Startup experience

Tools

LLMs

APIs

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Sycamore is seeking a Senior Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering to build and lead the FDE team in Palo Alto. You’ll guide a small, hands-on group as they work directly with Fortune 500 customers to solve complex problems and deliver production deployments.

You’ll recruit, mentor, and develop engineers, stay hands-on with technical discovery, own enterprise programs from discovery to deployment, and shape how we scale the FDE organization while partnering with engineering, product, and GTM.