Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

As Team Lead Forward Deployed Engineering at Parloa, you'll lead a high-impact team of FDEs that delivers strategic enterprise deployments. Your mission is to ensure consistent deployment excellence: predictable delivery, strong engineering quality, and fast unblocking in complex enterprise environments — while staying technically credible yourself.

What you'll do

• Lead and develop the team: hire, coach, and grow a team of FDEs; set clear expectations; run 1:1s, feedback cycles, and performance development.
• Own capacity planning and staffing: allocate engineers across parallel strategic projects, manage load and utilization, and anticipate delivery bottlenecks early.
• Drive project delivery management: own engineering delivery across deployments — milestones, dependencies, risk management, escalation paths, and stakeholder alignment.
• Establish time tracking and delivery visibility: implement lightweight tracking and reporting that creates trusted insight into effort, progress, and capacity.
• Provide technical leadership and escalation support: guide architecture and implementation choices, review designs/code when needed, and unblock high-severity issues in production environments.
• Create scalable field engineering practices: build reusable patterns, playbooks, and standards that improve reliability, maintainability, and speed across deployments.
• Shape the product via field learnings: translate recurring customer needs into clear productization proposals and partner with Product/Core Engineering to reduce one-offs.

What you'll need

• 8+ years in software engineering, systems integration, DevOps, or data engineering roles with meaningful production responsibility.
• Proven ability to lead and develop engineers (formal management, team lead responsibility, coaching, hiring, performance growth).
• Demonstrated success delivering complex technical projects in large enterprise environments with multiple stakeholders and constraints.
• Strong capabilities across backend engineering, APIs, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and databases.
• Able to personally own and drive smaller technical workstreams end-to-end and to jump into debugging/implementation when necessary.
• Strong planning, prioritization, capacity thinking, and risk management; creates delivery clarity without unnecessary process overhead.
• Confident and credible with customer engineering teams and senior technical stakeholders; clear written and verbal communication.

Nice to have

• Experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered systems (agent workflows, orchestration, evaluation, vector DBs, guardrails), ideally in forward-deployed or solutions engineering environments.

What they offer

• Work on agentic AI shaping the future of customer experience at enterprise scale
• Lead a high-impact forward-deployed engineering team
• Operate in a fast-moving category with complex, meaningful problems