Head of Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE)

YOUR MISSION:

As Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, AMER (FDE) at Parloa, you own the success of enterprise AI deployments. Your mission is to build and lead a world-class FDE organization that delivers predictable, high-quality, and scalable enterprise implementations—while continuously feeding field insight back into product and platform evolution.

You are responsible not just for delivery excellence across projects, but for shaping how Parloa scales enterprise AI adoption. You define the operating model, elevate technical standards, build leadership capacity within the FDE org, and ensure that what we deploy repeatedly becomes productized.

FDE is where product meets enterprise reality. As Head of FDE, you ensure that reality strengthens the product rather than fragmenting it.

IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL:

• Regional FDE Strategy & Operating Model: Establish scalable delivery models (pods, vertical focus, specialization layers) and balance customization and productization to maximize impact and margin.
• Build and Develop a High-Performance Organization: Hire, coach, and develop Team Leads and senior FDEs as well as build leadership capacity within the organization (succession planning, career ladders, growth paths). Establish strong performance standards and accountability frameworks while ensuring a culture of ownership.
• Ensure Predictable, High-Quality Enterprise Delivery: Own delivery health across all strategic deployments by implementing scalable capacity planning, forecasting, and utilization management. 
• Standardize project governance: risk management, escalation paths, dependency tracking and define quality benchmarks for architecture, security, reliability, and maintainability.  Ensure strong production stability in enterprise environments.
• Drive Technical Excellence & Architectural Standards: Define architectural guardrails and reference patterns for enterprise deployments. Establish review mechanisms for high-impact technical decisions. Ensure repeatable integration patterns across enterprise systems (APIs, identity, data pipelines). Maintain deep technical credibility across cloud, backend, infra, and AI system design.
• Turn Field Learnings into Product Leverage: Identify recurring implementation patterns and push for productization. Partner closely with Product and Core Engineering to reduce one-offs implementations and provide educated input on roadmap prioritization using structured field data. Define criteria for what belongs in-product vs. what remains custom.
• Strengthen Customer & Executive Relationships: Serve as executive technical sponsor for key enterprise accounts. Build trust with CIOs, enterprise architects, and platform leaders. Support pre-sales for highly strategic opportunities. Represent FDE in executive customer escalations.

Our Technology Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, MongoDB

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

• Experience level: 10 to 15+ years in customer-facing software engineering, systems integration, DevOps, or data engineering roles with meaningful production responsibility.
• People leadership: 4+ years leading engineering delivery teams, ideally leaders-of-leaders (e.g., formal management, team lead responsibility, coaching, hiring, performance growth).
• Organizational leadership: Experience building and scaling engineering or forward-deployed/solutions teams.  Proven ability to design operating models and scale delivery capacity.  Strong hiring and talent development track record.
• Enterprise delivery track record: Demonstrated success delivering large-scale enterprise technical programs.  Experience managing multiple parallel deployments with executive visibility.  Strong grasp of stakeholder management in complex environments.
• Technical breadth and depth: Deep expertise across backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code, and system integrations.  Strong architectural judgment in high-stakes production systems.  Ability to engage at depth on AI system design and integration.
• Strategic product thinking: Experience translating field patterns into product strategy.  Strong intuition for what should be standardized vs. customized.  Comfort influencing roadmap decisions through structured insight.
• Hands-on effectiveness: Able to personally own and drive smaller technical workstreams end-to-end and to jump into debugging/implementation when necessary.
• Operational excellence: Strong planning, prioritization, capacity thinking, and risk management; creates delivery clarity without unnecessary process overhead.
• Executive presence: Confident and credible with customer engineering teams and senior technical stakeholders; clear written and verbal communication.

Strong plus: experience with telephony architecture (PSTN, SIP), building or integrating AI/LLM-powered systems (agent workflows, orchestration, evaluation, vector DBs, guardrails), ideally in forward-deployed or solutions engineering environments.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?

• Join a diverse team of 40+ nationalities with flat hierarchies and a collaborative company culture, and enjoy an immersive onboarding experience in Berlin to dive into our product and culture.
• Opportunity to build and scale your career at the intersection of customer-facing roles and engineering in a dynamic startup on its journey to become an international leader in SaaS platforms for Conversational AI.
• A beautiful office with flair in the heart of NYC with all the conveniences, such as social area, snacks, and drinks.
• Competitive compensation and equity package.
• Flexible working hours, unlimited PTO, and travel opportunities.
• Access to a training and development budget for continuous professional growth.
• ClassPass membership, Nilo Health, Health insurance, weekly sponsored office lunches.
• Regular team events, game nights, and other social activities.

OTE Salary Range - $304,000 - $338,000 OTE + Equity