Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Who you are

• Experience level: 8+ years in software engineering, systems integration, DevOps, or data engineering roles with meaningful production responsibility
• People leadership: proven ability to lead and develop engineers (e.g., formal management, team lead responsibility, coaching, hiring, performance growth)
• Enterprise delivery track record: demonstrated success delivering complex technical projects in large enterprise environments with multiple stakeholders and constraints
• Technical breadth and depth: strong capabilities across backend engineering, APIs, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and databases — able to review designs and guide production decisions
• Hands-on effectiveness: able to personally own and drive smaller technical workstreams end-to-end and to jump into debugging/implementation when necessary
• Operational excellence: strong planning, prioritization, capacity thinking, and risk management; creates delivery clarity without unnecessary process overhead
• Customer-facing communication: confident and credible with customer engineering teams and senior technical stakeholders; clear written and verbal communication
• Strong plus: experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered systems (agent workflows, orchestration, evaluation, vector DBs, guardrails), ideally in forward-deployed or solutions engineering environments

What the job involves

• As a Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Parloa, you’ll be on the front lines of enterprise AI adoption — leading a high-impact team of FDEs that delivers our most strategic enterprise deployments. Your mission is to ensure our consistent deployment excellence: predictable delivery, strong engineering quality, and fast unblocking in complex enterprise environments — while staying technically credible yourself
• FDEs are our in-field engineers. They build what doesn’t exist yet, adapt architecture to enterprise realities, and engineer integrations across systems and APIs to make deployments successful. As a Manager, you make that work repeatable and reliable across multiple customer projects — through strong delivery leadership, clear priorities, and hands-on technical guidance
• 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 (without bureaucracy)
• 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 over time
• Partner with customer engineering and enterprise stakeholders: collaborate directly with customer teams (architecture, security, platform) to deliver outcomes and build long-term technical trust

The application process

• Talent Acquisition → Hiring Manager → Technical Interview(s) → Bar Raiser