Forward Deployment Engineering Manager, FDE

About the role

A Forward Deployment Engineering Manager (FDE Manager) leads a pod of FDEs embedded within strategic enterprise customers, owning delivery execution, engineering quality and team development. FDE Managers operate at pod or multi-pod scope, leading 5-15 engineers and owning technical delivery across one or more concurrent customer engagements. They represent the FDE team to customer engineering leaders and AWS stakeholders, balancing delivery with people development. The role requires 30-50% travel.

Key responsibilities

• Lead FDE pod delivery: own delivery across customer engagements, staff and structure the team, set execution cadences and ensure consistent engineering quality.
• Provide technical oversight of customer AI programs, review architecture decisions against customer needs and AWS best practices, and resolve or escalate technical blockers.
• Ensure operational standards, evaluation frameworks and production readiness criteria are met for AI systems built by the team.
• Hire, coach and retain FDE talent, drive performance management and development plans, and contribute to hiring and calibration standards.
• Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption in customer engagements and turn learnings into reusable patterns for the broader FDE practice.

Required profile

• 3+ years of engineering team management experience.
• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related field.
• 7+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 3+ years in an Agile, startup or rapidly scaling environment.
• Experience communicating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership.
• Experience building or deploying AI/ML applications in production at scale; agentic and spec-driven development is a plus.

Preferred qualifications

• Direct experience in customer implementations and managing teams in customer-facing or consulting-adjacent roles.
• Experience with React, TypeScript, Python and/or Go.
• Managing delivery across multiple concurrent customer programs and 3+ years of leadership and talent management experience.

What we offer

• Base salary of $184,900-$250,200 in Seattle, plus sign-on payments and restricted stock units.
• Health, dental, vision and prescription insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off and parental leave.