Manager of Software Engineering - FDE

Manager of Software Engineering - FDE

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location:

New York City, Dallas, Toronto (Hybrid)

The Client:

Manager of Software Engineering – Forward Deployed Engineering (AI)

I’m partnering with a global technology leader making a major investment in the next generation of professional AI. This is an opportunity to lead within one of its flagship AI engineering teams, building agentic systems that are transforming how some of the world’s leading legal organizations work.

As Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering, you’ll lead a team working directly with customers to take complex problems from discovery and prototype through production using LLMs, RAG, agents, and multi-step agentic workflows. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll remain close to the technology while owning team development, technical direction, and delivery.

What you'll be working on:

• Lead and support multiple Forward Deployed Engineering teams delivering complex AI solutions for enterprise customers.
• Architect and guide scalable, secure AI and software solutions across the full development lifecycle.
• Provide technical leadership across LLM-powered agents, RAG, system architecture, integrations, and production AI systems.
• Work directly with customers to understand complex requirements and translate them into technical solutions, POCs, and production deployments.
• Drive best practices across LLMOps, AI evaluation, monitoring, testing, security, and observability.
• Turn successful customer-specific solutions into reusable engineering patterns and scalable product capabilities.
• Hire, coach, mentor, and develop engineers while building a high-performing technical team.
• Partner across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success to ensure customer feedback helps shape the broader AI product roadmap.

What they're looking for:

• 10+ years of software or solutions engineering experience, including 2+ years in engineering management or technical leadership.
• Experience leading and growing teams of Forward Deployed, Solutions, Field, or customer-facing Software Engineers.
• A strong technical foundation with the ability to remain hands-on rather than operating as a purely administrative manager.
• Significant customer-facing experience, including technical discovery, architecture discussions, POCs, and enterprise deployments.
• Strong Python development and backend engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered agents and AI applications into production.
• Experience with RAG, agentic systems, AI evaluation, guardrails, observability, and production AI infrastructure.
• Strong AWS experience alongside CI/CD, Docker, and modern cloud deployment practices.
• Experience operating at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Legal technology or legal industry experience is a plus, but not required.

This is a unique opportunity for a technical engineering leader who wants to combine people leadership with hands-on AI engineering — leading a customer-facing team while helping shape how production AI is built, deployed, and scaled across a global organization.