Lead Forward Deployed Engineering

Engine's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function is our partner-embedded Engineering team that owns demand partner integrations and custom development work for partners of Engine's marketplace, with the north star of producing quality code and accelerating marketplace revenue. We're hiring a player-coach to help accelerate the team through its next phase: standing up repeatable delivery standards, governing AI-native build practices, owning our highest-stakes partner engagements, and building credibility with internal Product & Engineering stakeholders.

This is a hybrid leadership/individual contributor role. You'll help shape strategy for the FDE team and define best practices within the team and working with other internal stakeholders. You will also act as the lead FDE on the integrations that matter most - new verticals, non-standard partner APIs, and on hosted experiences where an experienced builder needs to be in the room. Aside from external partners, you'll also partner closely with Backend and Frontend Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Product, and other commercial stakeholders.

What you'll do:

- Own technical strategy for demand-side delivery across the partner portfolio, setting standards adopted across FDE and SE
- Work with your manager and other cross-functional leaders to develop standard operating procedures/processes, implementing best practices to help accelerate the team
- Take personal ownership of the most complex, ambiguous, or net-new-vertical integrations end-to-end
- Turn bespoke builds into a repeatable motions - shared modules, templates, runbooks, etc
- Architect and govern AI-native engineering practices: code-gen pipelines, mapping automation, test-scaffolding agents, and the human-review gates that keep AI-assisted builds safe and production-ready
- Mentor FDEs through design and code review, creating a feedback loop that helps raises the team's engineering standard
- Drive structured Product/Engineering feedback loops that reduce future bespoke work, and free team bandwidth to work on new work streams

What you bring:

- 8+ years experience with time in a senior/staff integration, platform, or forward-deployed engineering role. People leadership or strong informal team leadership preferred.
- Production-quality code in Scala and/or Python, with comfort in Node.js/TypeScript for SDKs and tooling.
- Deep REST/JSON API fluency: auth, idempotency, schema evolution, versioning, and the operational tail (monitoring, incident response).
- A track record standing up reusable architecture, tooling, or playbooks that scaled a team's output without proportional headcount growth.
- AI-native workflow fluency - you use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot as a first-class accelerant, and know when to drop to deterministic approaches.
- Comfort running technical working sessions directly with partner engineering teams.
- A pattern-recognition instinct: after solving something novel, you package the repeatable version.

Compensation

On Target Earnings $200K – $240K • Offers Commission