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Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
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🚀 Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
📍 London or the Gulf
💰 Competitive base + very early-stage equity
✈️ Travel to customer sites in the Gulf; (a few days once a month / bi-monthly)
The company
AI startup building for the physical world. $30M Series A closed weeks ago, led by one of Silicon Valley's best-known funds with sovereign capital in the round. The founders came out of one of the world's most talked-about AI companies, and most of the founding engineers followed them.
The product is AI that runs critical infrastructure operations: ports, airlines, energy grids. It lives embedded inside government and large enterprise operators, on live data, in environments where a wrong answer stops a port.
The role
You'd be the first FDE, owning the motion the entire company runs on: first discovery conversation through go-live. Nine engineers today. The deployment playbook doesn't exist yet, you write it, and every FDE hired after you ramps on it.
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This is a player-coach seat where the player half comes first. You’ll stay in the codebase, ship full-stack features with the customer in the room, and make the call that compounds: what stays a one-off, what becomes platform.
You get real access. Credentials into a national operator's systems, a seat next to the people running the grid. Not a read-only API and a weekly status call.
What good looks like after 12 months
- Flagship deployments went from signed contract to running in production under your ownership
- An FDE team exists, hired against your bar, ramping on your playbook
- The core platform ships faster because your specs told engineering exactly what to build
- Success got measured in operators depending on the system, not tickets closed
The bar
Engineering leads here. You write production-grade TypeScript/React plus Python or Node unsupervised, you've done it for 5+ years, and you've shipped in front of customers (live deployments with real users, no demo theatre). On top of that, you make other engineers better without leaving the field: scoping, customer judgment, technical calls under pressure.
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Requirements
- 5+ years in forward deployed, field, or customer-facing engineering, shipping production code
- You've personally carried enterprise or government deployments to go-live
- Strong TypeScript + React, plus Python or Node (or other similar modern language background)
- Excellent communication, with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- You coach junior engineers while staying hands-on yourself
- Comfortable with ambiguity: no spec, no playbook, your call
Nice to have
- AI-native product experience
- Enterprise scars: SSO, VPCs, security reviews, on-prem, legacy systems that fight back
- Operationally complex industries: logistics, aviation, energy, industrial
Exceptional builders who leads from the front? Apply.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
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