Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

The Lead Forward Deployed Engineer owns delivery excellence across a portfolio of client accounts. You will set technical direction, coach engineers on live client work, and ensure client confidence through technical leadership.

What you will do

• Maintain a clear view of delivery status, risks, blockers, and priorities across assigned accounts
• Ensure each engagement has a practical execution plan and appropriate technical path
• Guide solution architecture and technical decision-making across multiple concurrent engagements
• Review critical work before it is shared with clients
• Coach engineers on accounts based on real engagement work
• Provide direct, timely, actionable feedback on technical execution and client communication
• Serve as the senior technical and delivery presence for clients
• Define the operating cadence for each account
• Identify technical, staffing, scope, timeline, and client-alignment risks
• Escalate material risks to executive and account leadership

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time in client-facing or field delivery roles
• Demonstrated ownership of delivery quality across multiple concurrent engagements or accounts
• Strong Python, production AI/ML delivery, and sound architectural judgment
• Proven experience developing engineers through direct, specific, timely feedback
• Excellent executive and technical communication
• Deep comfort with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), CI/CD, and production deployment practices
• Strong commercial awareness

Nice to have

• Substantial production experience with LLMs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere), vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems
• Prior consulting, professional services, or engagement leadership experience in a technical services environment
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and tooling (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker)
• Working knowledge of enterprise security, data privacy, and compliance constraints
• Experience scaling delivery standards across a growing team without becoming the bottleneck

Benefits

• Competitive compensation (salary + deployment bonuses or client uplift incentives)
• Equity options
• Fully remote work
• WFH stipend
• Monthly lifestyle stipend

About the company

Eliza is a technology services company and Advanced-tier OpenAI partner that’s dedicated to helping organizations build and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions.