Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Overview

As Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, you lead delivery for Scale AI’s largest enterprise accounts, embedding with Fortune 500 customers to ship integrated AI agents and production-ready platforms. You will own end-to-end delivery, build and scale a high-performance team, and collaborate with Product and Platform teams to transform field insights into reusable capabilities. This role emphasizes autonomy, executive-level stakeholder engagement, and shaping how AI adoption happens at scale. You will drive durable deployments, reliability, and measurable business outcomes for enterprise clients.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery for the largest accounts, scoping engagements and sequencing delivery to drive production adoption
• Lead, hire, and grow a world-class Forward Deployed Engineering team with scalable onboarding and career frameworks
• Provide holistic technical oversight across agents, models, evaluations, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
• Collaborate with Forward Deployed, Product, and Platform teams to codify patterns into reusable platform capabilities and playbooks
• Engage with senior customer leadership, translating business problems into technical roadmaps and representing Scale at the executive level
• Enforce production excellence around reliability, security, observability, and evaluation
• Feed field insights back into Product and Research to influence roadmap and features
• Operate with a founder mindset, delivering outcomes with urgency and high ownership under ambiguity

• 10+ years of software engineering or technical delivery experience
• 3+ years leading high-performing customer-facing engineering teams
• Proven ability to scale a delivery team with hiring standards and onboarding programs
• Hands-on fluency with AI stack: LLMs, agent systems, evaluation frameworks, backend/API design (Python or TypeScript), data systems (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB), and cloud infra (AWS/Azure/GCP) including Kubernetes, Docker, IaC
• Experience deploying AI into complex enterprise environments with security, identity/SSO, data residency, legacy integrations, and compliance
• Track record of turning field work into scalable product leverage
• Strong cross-functional leadership and exceptional communication; founder mindset

• cross-functional leadership
• executive-level communication
• ambition and ownership
• LLMs and agent systems
• evaluation frameworks
• backend and API design (Python, TypeScript)