{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"ce2fe215df85edde625bcec2","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/ce2fe215df85edde625bcec2","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/ce2fe215df85edde625bcec2","title":"Lead Forward Deployed Engineer","description":"Lead Forward Deployed Engineer\nAbout Us\nEliza is a technology services company and Advanced-tier OpenAI partner that’s dedicated to helping organizations build and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions. From generative AI and custom LLM integrations to predictive analytics and intelligent automation, we work across industries to bring real-world AI applications to life. Our projects combine deep technical expertise with hands-on client collaboration to solve high-impact problems.\nRole Overview\nThe Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (Lead FDE) owns delivery excellence across a portfolio of client accounts. The closest analogy is a coach: you are accountable for how the team performs in the field. You set the standard, guide technical direction across engagements, develop the engineers doing the work, make delivery adjustments in-flight, and ensure clients trust both the team and the outcome.\nWhere a Senior FDE goes deep on one hard problem, a Lead FDE holds the quality bar across several at once—without becoming the bottleneck. That means knowing when to coach someone through a problem and when to step in yourself, and having the technical credibility to do either. You will review critical architecture before it reaches clients, and you will give the engineers on your accounts the direct, specific feedback that actually makes them better.\nThis is a field leadership role. Your focus is delivery, technical direction, and developing the team on live client work—not administrative process.\nKey Responsibilities\n1. Own Portfolio Delivery Quality\nMaintain a clear view of delivery status, risks, blockers, and priorities across assigned accounts.\nEnsure each engagement has a practical execution plan, clear ownership, and an appropriate technical path.\nHold every account team to Eliza's quality bar.\nIntervene early when delivery quality, pace, client confidence, or execution discipline is at risk.\nKeep delivery aligned to client outcomes, engagement scope, and business priorities.\n2. Set Technical Direction Across Engagements\nGuide solution architecture and technical decision-making across multiple concurrent engagements.\nReview critical work before it is shared with clients.\nEnsure technical decisions are pragmatic, maintainable, and appropriate for each client's environment.\nHelp teams make clear tradeoffs between speed, quality, scope, and client value.\nIdentify when an engagement needs additional technical expertise or senior escalation.\n3. Coach and Develop the Field Team\nCoach the engineers on your accounts based on their real engagement work, not abstractions.\nProvide direct, timely, actionable feedback on technical execution, client communication, ownership, and judgment.\nHelp team members improve how they frame tradeoffs, manage ambiguity, and drive work to completion.\nRun milestone retrospectives so teams learn from each phase of an engagement and adjust.\nRecognize when someone is ready for more responsibility, and when someone needs more support.\nKeep the team focused, motivated, and aligned around client outcomes.\n4. Maintain Client Confidence\nServe as the senior technical and delivery presence for clients across your portfolio.\nEnsure client communication is clear, credible, and appropriately proactive.\nSurface risks early and manage expectations with discipline.\nHelp clients understand the path from problem definition to shipped outcome.\nPartner with account and commercial leadership so delivery realities are reflected in account strategy.\n5. Establish Execution Discipline\nDefine the right operating cadence for each account: internal reviews, client checkpoints, technical reviews.\nEnsure work is broken down clearly and assigned to accountable owners.\nTrack commitments, decisions, blockers, and client feedback.\nCreate enough structure for teams to move quickly without unnecessary process.\nKeep teams focused on outcomes rather than activity.\n6. Manage Delivery Risk and Escalation\nIdentify technical, staffing, scope, timeline, and client-alignment risks across the portfolio.\nDecide when to coach the team through an issue versus when to intervene directly.\nEscalate material risks to executive and account leadership with a clear recommendation.\nHelp the business distinguish between delivery issues, resourcing issues, scope issues, and client-alignment issues.\nQualifications\nRequired\n8+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time in client-facing or field delivery roles.\nDemonstrated ownership of delivery quality across multiple concurrent engagements or accounts.\nDeep hands-on technical credibility: strong Python, production AI/ML delivery, and sound architectural judgment. You still read the code.\nProven experience developing engineers through direct, specific, timely feedback.\nExcellent executive and technical communication—credible with a client CTO and with an engineer on the same day.\nDeep comfort with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), CI/CD, and production deployment practices.\nStrong commercial awareness: you understand how delivery decisions affect account health and business outcomes.\nPreferred\nSubstantial production experience with LLMs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere), vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems.\nPrior consulting, professional services, or engagement leadership experience in a technical services environment.\nFamiliarity with MLOps practices and tooling (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker).\nWorking knowledge of enterprise security, data privacy, and compliance constraints.\nExperience scaling delivery standards across a growing team without becoming the bottleneck.\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive compensation (salary + deployment bonuses or client uplift incentives).\nEquity options in a growing AI services company.\nFully remote work\nRemote work perks include a WFH stipend and monthly lifestyle stipend\nReal ownership of a client portfolio and the team delivering it.\nA leadership role that keeps you technical and in the field.\nFlexibility to work across industries and problem domains.\nA collaborative, mission-driven team passionate about the real-world impact of AI.","company":"Eliza","rawCompany":"eliza","city":"Remote","state":"OR","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-08-05T00:13:47.766Z","occupations":[{"code":"11-9041.00","title":"Architectural and Engineering Managers","slug":"architectural-and-engineering-managers"},{"code":"15-1252.00","title":"Software Developers","slug":"software-developers"},{"code":"17-2199.00","title":"Engineers, All Other","slug":"engineers-all-other"}],"industries":[{"code":"541511","title":"Custom Computer Programming Services","slug":"custom-computer-programming-services"},{"code":"541512","title":"Computer Systems Design Services","slug":"computer-systems-design-services"},{"code":"541330","title":"Engineering Services","slug":"engineering-services"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Lead Forward Deployed Engineer","description":"Lead Forward Deployed Engineer\nAbout Us\nEliza is a technology services company and Advanced-tier OpenAI partner that’s dedicated to helping organizations build and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions. From generative AI and custom LLM integrations to predictive analytics and intelligent automation, we work across industries to bring real-world AI applications to life. Our projects combine deep technical expertise with hands-on client collaboration to solve high-impact problems.\nRole Overview\nThe Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (Lead FDE) owns delivery excellence across a portfolio of client accounts. The closest analogy is a coach: you are accountable for how the team performs in the field. You set the standard, guide technical direction across engagements, develop the engineers doing the work, make delivery adjustments in-flight, and ensure clients trust both the team and the outcome.\nWhere a Senior FDE goes deep on one hard problem, a Lead FDE holds the quality bar across several at once—without becoming the bottleneck. That means knowing when to coach someone through a problem and when to step in yourself, and having the technical credibility to do either. You will review critical architecture before it reaches clients, and you will give the engineers on your accounts the direct, specific feedback that actually makes them better.\nThis is a field leadership role. Your focus is delivery, technical direction, and developing the team on live client work—not administrative process.\nKey Responsibilities\n1. Own Portfolio Delivery Quality\nMaintain a clear view of delivery status, risks, blockers, and priorities across assigned accounts.\nEnsure each engagement has a practical execution plan, clear ownership, and an appropriate technical path.\nHold every account team to Eliza's quality bar.\nIntervene early when delivery quality, pace, client confidence, or execution discipline is at risk.\nKeep delivery aligned to client outcomes, engagement scope, and business priorities.\n2. Set Technical Direction Across Engagements\nGuide solution architecture and technical decision-making across multiple concurrent engagements.\nReview critical work before it is shared with clients.\nEnsure technical decisions are pragmatic, maintainable, and appropriate for each client's environment.\nHelp teams make clear tradeoffs between speed, quality, scope, and client value.\nIdentify when an engagement needs additional technical expertise or senior escalation.\n3. Coach and Develop the Field Team\nCoach the engineers on your accounts based on their real engagement work, not abstractions.\nProvide direct, timely, actionable feedback on technical execution, client communication, ownership, and judgment.\nHelp team members improve how they frame tradeoffs, manage ambiguity, and drive work to completion.\nRun milestone retrospectives so teams learn from each phase of an engagement and adjust.\nRecognize when someone is ready for more responsibility, and when someone needs more support.\nKeep the team focused, motivated, and aligned around client outcomes.\n4. Maintain Client Confidence\nServe as the senior technical and delivery presence for clients across your portfolio.\nEnsure client communication is clear, credible, and appropriately proactive.\nSurface risks early and manage expectations with discipline.\nHelp clients understand the path from problem definition to shipped outcome.\nPartner with account and commercial leadership so delivery realities are reflected in account strategy.\n5. Establish Execution Discipline\nDefine the right operating cadence for each account: internal reviews, client checkpoints, technical reviews.\nEnsure work is broken down clearly and assigned to accountable owners.\nTrack commitments, decisions, blockers, and client feedback.\nCreate enough structure for teams to move quickly without unnecessary process.\nKeep teams focused on outcomes rather than activity.\n6. Manage Delivery Risk and Escalation\nIdentify technical, staffing, scope, timeline, and client-alignment risks across the portfolio.\nDecide when to coach the team through an issue versus when to intervene directly.\nEscalate material risks to executive and account leadership with a clear recommendation.\nHelp the business distinguish between delivery issues, resourcing issues, scope issues, and client-alignment issues.\nQualifications\nRequired\n8+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time in client-facing or field delivery roles.\nDemonstrated ownership of delivery quality across multiple concurrent engagements or accounts.\nDeep hands-on technical credibility: strong Python, production AI/ML delivery, and sound architectural judgment. You still read the code.\nProven experience developing engineers through direct, specific, timely feedback.\nExcellent executive and technical communication—credible with a client CTO and with an engineer on the same day.\nDeep comfort with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), CI/CD, and production deployment practices.\nStrong commercial awareness: you understand how delivery decisions affect account health and business outcomes.\nPreferred\nSubstantial production experience with LLMs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere), vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems.\nPrior consulting, professional services, or engagement leadership experience in a technical services environment.\nFamiliarity with MLOps practices and tooling (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker).\nWorking knowledge of enterprise security, data privacy, and compliance constraints.\nExperience scaling delivery standards across a growing team without becoming the bottleneck.\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive compensation (salary + deployment bonuses or client uplift incentives).\nEquity options in a growing AI services company.\nFully remote work\nRemote work perks include a WFH stipend and monthly lifestyle stipend\nReal ownership of a client portfolio and the team delivering it.\nA leadership role that keeps you technical and in the field.\nFlexibility to work across industries and problem domains.\nA collaborative, mission-driven team passionate about the real-world impact of AI.","datePosted":"2026-08-05T00:13:47.766Z","dateModified":"2026-08-05T00:13:47.766Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Eliza","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Remote","addressRegion":"OR","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"ce2fe215df85edde625bcec2"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/ce2fe215df85edde625bcec2"}}