Director, Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Summary

The Director of Forward Deployed Engineering is the executive leader responsible for building and scaling the platform that accelerates Customer Experience Automation (CXA) and Agentic AI deployments across Talkdesk's largest enterprise customers. Rather than solving each customer engagement from scratch, you will lead a high-caliber team of engineers who create the reusable libraries, evaluation systems, and safe deployment infrastructure that make every subsequent implementation faster, more accurate, and increasingly differentiated.

This role requires a unique blend of strategic organizational leadership, deep technical expertise in AI/ML, and a platform-engineering mindset. Your work will feed critical field insights back to the core Product and Engineering teams and directly influence the long-term platform roadmap.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Platform Strategy & Vision: Define and execute the strategy for the FDE platform — a proprietary system of industry-verticalized prompt libraries, integration skills, and automated evaluation suites that accelerate CXA implementations and compound in value over time.

• Operational Excellence: Develop and execute the FDE operational strategy, defining the "golden path" for deployments, ensuring scalability, security, and high performance across all client environments.

• Cross-Functional Bridge: Serve as the primary liaison between Sales, Product Management, and Core Engineering. Advocate for platform capabilities that solve recurring customer pain points and align the field team with the product roadmap.

• Technical Governance: Identify and mitigate complex technical risks across agentic deployments. Ensure the team maintains technical excellence and follows best practices for RAG systems, multi-agent orchestration, API integrations, and secure data architecture.

• Team Development & Mentorship: Hire, manage, and mentor a team of FDEs. Foster a culture of platform thinking, high-stakes problem solving, and continuous learning in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

• Executive Technical Authority: Act as the ultimate technical escalation point for customers. Build high-trust relationships with customer CTOs and VPs of Engineering during the most critical phases of the deployment lifecycle.
  
  

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, or a related technical field.
• Experience: Minimum of 9–12 years of experience in software engineering or professional services, including at least 5 years in a significant leadership role (Manager or above) managing customer-facing technical teams.
• AI/ML Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of Agentic AI Architecture, including multi-agent orchestration, prompt engineering, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
• Technical Depth: Strong architectural knowledge of systems integration (APIs, webhooks, message queues) and the ability to review production-grade code in Python, Javascript, or Typescript.
• Field Experience: Proven track record of delivering high-stakes technical projects in complex enterprise environments (e.g., Healthcare, Financial Services, or CCaaS).
• Leadership Skills: Exceptional ability to motivate and grow a team of high-performing, autonomous "hybrid" engineers who excel at both coding and client interaction.
• Strategic Thinking: Demonstrated success in turning one-off customer solutions into scalable, repeatable engineering patterns.
• Communication: Mastery in translating "deep tech" AI concepts into business value for executive stakeholders.

 

Pay Range (Base Pay):   $260,000 - $409,000

Other Types of Pay: Based on level and role the employee may be eligible for long term incentives in the form of equity and short term incentives of either bonus or commission. 

Health Insurance: Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and Disability Insurance, Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

Retirement Benefits: 401(k) plan

Paid Time Off: Talkdesk offers an uncapped paid time off program for exempt employees and an accrual-based program for non-exempt employees; both are subject to manager approval and consistent with business needs.

Paid Holidays: Talkdesk offers 14 paid holidays each year. 

Paid Sick Leave: Exempt employees have uncapped paid time off and non-exempt sick leave follows accru