Lead, Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

Engine’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function is its partner-embedded Engineering team, responsible for demand partner integrations and custom development across Engine’s marketplace. Its north star is delivering high-quality code that accelerates marketplace revenue.

We’re looking for a player-coach to help lead the team through its next phase: establishing repeatable delivery standards, governing AI-native engineering practices, owning the highest-stakes partner engagements, and building strong partnerships with internal Product and Engineering teams. This role combines team leadership with hands-on engineering.

You’ll help shape the FDE team’s strategy and best practices, lead the integrations that matter most-including new verticals, non-standard partner APIs, and hosted experiences-and work closely with partner engineering teams, Backend and Frontend Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Product, and commercial stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy for demand-side delivery across the partner portfolio, setting standards adopted across FDE and Solutions Engineering.
• Partner with your manager and cross-functional leaders to develop and implement standard operating procedures and delivery practices that help accelerate the team.
• Personally lead the most complex, ambiguous, or new-vertical integrations end to end.
• Turn bespoke builds into repeatable solutions, including shared modules, templates, and runbooks.
• Architect and govern AI-native engineering practices, including code-generation pipelines, mapping automation, test-scaffolding agents, and human-review gates that keep AI-assisted builds safe and production-ready.
• Mentor FDEs through design and code reviews, creating a feedback loop that raises the team’s engineering standard.
• Drive structured Product and Engineering feedback loops that reduce future bespoke work and free team capacity for new workstreams.
• Lead technical working sessions with partner engineering teams, bringing experienced hands-on guidance to critical integrations and hosted experiences.

About You

Experience: 8+ years of experience, including time in a senior or staff-level integration, platform, or forward-deployed engineering role. People leadership or strong informal team leadership experience is preferred.

Skills

• Write production-quality code in Scala and/or Python, with working comfort in Node.js/TypeScript for SDKs and tooling.
• Bring deep REST/JSON API expertise, including authentication, idempotency, schema evolution, versioning, monitoring, and incident response.
• Have a track record of building reusable architecture, tooling, or playbooks that scaled a team’s output without proportional headcount growth.
• Use AI-native workflows and tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot as first-class accelerants, while knowing when deterministic approaches are the right choice.
• Facilitate technical working sessions directly with partner engineering teams.

Personal Attributes

• Recognize patterns and turn novel solutions into repeatable practices.
• Take ownership of complex, ambiguous work and balance strategic leadership with hands-on execution.
• Build trust and credibility across partner, Product, Engineering, Solutions Engineering, and commercial teams.
• Invest in colleagues’ growth through thoughtful mentoring, design feedback, and code review.

What’s Next

After you submit your application, you can expect the following steps in the recruitment process:

• Online Technical Test
• TA Call
• Live Coding (Virtual)
• FinalInterview - Hiring Manager (Virtual or face-to-face)