Head of Forward Deployment Engineering

Role Overview

• Define and evolve the FDE organization's vision, operating model, execution playbooks, resourcing strategy, and quarterly priorities.
• Lead, mentor, and scale an existing team of Forward Deployed Engineers by raising the bar for hiring, technical excellence, execution, and customer impact.
• Own the technical strategy for Tavily's most strategic enterprise accounts, from discovery and solution design through POCs, production rollout, and expansion.
• Partner closely with Sales and Customer Success to shape technical strategy for strategic accounts, accelerate enterprise adoption, and drive expansion opportunities.
• Serve as the senior technical voice with executive stakeholders, including CTOs, VPs of Engineering, founders, and technical decision-makers.
• Stay hands-on by leading strategic customer engagements and building reference implementations, retrieval pipelines, agentic systems, production integrations, and technical prototypes on the Tavily API.
• Support select high-impact technical initiatives where senior field expertise is needed, including strategic customer, product, or partner-facing work.
• Build scalable internal assets, including playbooks, demo environments, documentation, reference architectures, tooling, and reusable templates.
• Synthesize customer patterns and technical feedback into clear product and engineering roadmap recommendations.
• Represent Tavily externally in executive customer conversations, strategic engagements, developer communities, conferences, and technical content.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Solutions Engineer, or Sales Engineer.
• 4+ years building or leading customer-facing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational scaling.
• Strong hands-on engineering ability in Python, APIs, distributed systems, and modern software architecture.
• Deep experience designing and building production AI systems, including LLM applications, agentic workflows, retrieval architectures, evaluation systems, and the infrastructure required to operate them reliably at scale.
• Strong familiarity with the modern AI application stack, including agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval infrastructure, evaluation tooling, and production deployment patterns.
• Proven track record leading the technical side of enterprise engagements from initial architecture discussions through successful production deployment and expansion.
• Strong business and commercial judgment, with the ability to balance customer outcomes, engineering investment, and company priorities when making technical and organizational decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across executive, technical, and developer audiences.
• A builder's mindset with the ability to create structure, operating rhythms, and scalable playbooks in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• Based in New York City or willing to relocate, or able to maintain a strong presence with the team and customers.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems
• Python

Benefits

• Health Insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k) Plan: Up to 4% company match with immediate vesting.
• Parental Leave: 20 weeks paid for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Remote Work Reimbursement: Up to $85/month for mobile and internet.
• Disability & Life Insurance: Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.