Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

The role

You will lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team in Customer Engineering. You will build a high-trust team and ensure the delivery of deepset's AI Platform into enterprise and public sector production environments.

What you will do

• Own team health and culture across four FDE profiles
• Run 1:1s and career conversations
• Build the hiring and onboarding pipeline
• Clear blockers and escalate delivery risks
• Staff FDE profiles to engagements and meet utilization targets
• Review architecture and solution decisions for RAG pipelines, deployment, and operations
• Deliver engagements on scope and plan
• Own resolution of customer escalations
• Partner with Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope and staffing
• Feed field insight to Product and Engineering

Required qualifications

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering, professional services, or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI, or infrastructure
• Strong coaching instincts
• Technical depth in RAG (retrieval, embeddings, re-ranking, evaluation), cloud and self-hosted deployments, model optimization, APIs, integrations, and IAM/security fundamentals
• Commercial awareness of scope, staffing, execution, utilization, revenue, and margin
• Clear, written and verbal communication with technical and executive audiences
• Comfort with ambiguity in a remote-first setup

Nice to have

• Experience running services or delivery inside a SaaS or platform company navigating the move to enterprise and self-hosted deployments
• Experience with OKR frameworks and squad-based delivery organizations
• Familiarity with agent-based systems, LLM platforms, and AI-native engineering tooling

Benefits

• Remote-first setup with flexible hours & tech of your choice
• 30 days vacation + extra days for family sick leave
• Competitive salary & stock options
• Monthly sports & mental health support allowance with Oliva
• Annual learning & development budget
• Monthly team socials & in-person meetups
• Dog-friendly Berlin HQ

About the company

Founded in 2018, deepset builds open and enterprise-grade tools that help teams build AI with purpose. They provide the Haystack open-source framework and the Haystack Enterprise Platform.