Tech Lead - Forward Deployed Engineering

The role

A highly senior individual-contributor role that provides technical leadership across multiple customer deployments. You will design agentic workflows, debug failures, and coach less experienced engineers.

What you will do

• Take the lead on complex, high-risk, or technically ambiguous customer deployments.
• Design agentic workflows, write and improve prompts, and build integrations.
• Debug failures, analyze system behavior, and ship production solutions.
• Diagnose issues across customer environments, integrations, agent performance, and data quality.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple customers and teams.
• Review solution designs, implementation plans, testing strategies, and production-readiness.
• Coach FDEs through technical problems and help junior team members develop skills.
• Identify risks, architectural weaknesses, and reliability issues.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to distinguish between deployment issues and platform gaps.
• Translate recurring customer challenges into reusable platform capabilities and tools.

Required qualifications

• Significant experience in software engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, solutions engineering, systems integration, implementation engineering, or a similarly hands-on technical role.
• Operated as a technical lead or senior individual contributor on complex, customer-facing software deployments.
• Comfortable moving across the full problem space from customer workflow to shipping production solutions.
• Exceptional problem solver who can bring structure to unclear situations.
• Strong technical judgment.
• Willing to personally take on difficult implementation and debugging work.
• Able to influence and lead other engineers without formal management authority.
• Strong coach.
• Communicate clearly with engineers, deployment teams, and customer stakeholders.
• Care deeply about production reliability, testing, observability, and solving underlying causes.
• Deeply curious about AI agents, prompting, automation, and multi-agent systems.
• Strong bias toward action.

Nice to have

• Prior experience is valuable (regarding AI agents, prompting, automation, and multi-agent systems).
• A science, engineering, or similarly technical educational background is helpful.

Benefits

• Opportunity to define the technical standard for Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Ownership of important and technically difficult customer problems.
• Chance to work at the frontier of agentic AI and multi-agent systems.
• Significant influence over product, platform, and deployment practices.
• Modern technical stack and access to leading AI tools.
• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Team offsites.

About the company

Magical is building an agentic AI platform that brings AI employees into the workplace to execute repetitive, operationally critical work. The company is backed by Greylock, Coatue, Altman Capital, Lightspeed, and other investors.