Director of Forward Deployed Engineering

Who you are

• You, first and foremost, truly believe in the FDE-led AI delivery motion. You want to be part of building and running an industry-best FDE team that implement enterprise production-grade AI solutions highly efficiently and at-scale
• You have 10+ years of experience as an Implementation Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Solution Engineer or an equivalent position within a B2B SaaS company
• You've led large, multi-quarter enterprise implementations- seven-figure ARR, staffed by cross-functional teams
• You have strong technical background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, and Data Science
• You've managed a team (5+ reports) and can grow one
• You're still sharp in production Python and SQL, and fluent with REST APIs, batch data pipelines, and data-warehouse integrations
• You're bilingual in tech and business: you go deep with engineers and talk value and trade-offs with executives
• You're collaborative, curious, and low-ego- you work well across product, engineering, and GTM teams, and you bring a genuine desire to advocate for customers' successes while maintaining Taktile solution and system principles
• You can work from our NYC office at least three days per week
• You have experience in building AI applications within financial services
• You have experience in applying and optimizing statistical and machine learning models to solve business problems
• You have first hand experience in at least one of our core use cases: business onboarding, business loan underwriting, insurance claim processing, and financial crime / fraud / AML investigation
• You have experience with at least one of the major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• We're eager to meet talented and driven candidates regardless of whether they tick all the boxes. We're looking for someone who will add to our culture, not just fit within it. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underestimated and underrepresented in tech to apply

What the job involves

• Taktile is building the infrastructure that enables financial institutions to become truly AI-native
• As our customer base grows, we're looking for a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to lead our NORAM FDE organization and scale how we deliver complex AI and decisioning solutions into production
• This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who has led teams of Forward Deployed, Implementation, or Delivery Engineers through complex enterprise deployments
• You’ll lead a team of 15-20 FDEs while also acting as a senior technical leader on our most challenging customer engagements
• You’ll help define the operating model, tooling, and standards that allow an FDE-led delivery organization to move quickly while consistently delivering production-grade solutions and measurable customer value
• As a coach:
• Lead a team of 15-20 FDEs in our NORAM region to ensure signed contracts are delivered in production with solid, measurable business value
• Own the Quarterly Go-live ARR metric for NORAM region
• Own team operations e.g. monitor signed contracts backlog, manage implementation pipeline, assign project staffing, monitor team capacity, review project milestones, evaluate and sign off project outcomes, etc
• Scale our FDE-led delivery motion by working closely with Engineering and Product teams to build and maintain the FDE tooling library and ensure flexibility, reusability, and maintainability in the FDE operating system layer
• Advocate for your team's priorities with Product and Engineering leaders, securing the resources to unblock and accelerate key implementations
• Hire and develop FDEs to keep pace with the business
• As a player:
• Act as principal FDE and solution architect on our most complex deployments, owning enterprise, production-grade design
• Bring technical expertise and authority to lead problem solving sessions with customers' technical teams and Taktile internal engineering teams
• Provide sharp signal on product-market fit, product gaps, and enhancements back to Product and Engineering
• Remain genuinely hands-on - platform configuration, AI-agent training and evals- and step into delivery work when a project needs it