VP, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

The role

You will lead and scale the Forward Deployed Engineering organization from 40 to 100+ engineers. You will set technical and organizational strategy, manage delivery quality, and own pipeline cost and performance.

What you will do

• Lead and scale the FDE organization by setting vision and operating models
• Drive hiring to grow the organization to 100+ engineers
• Coach and develop engineering managers and tech leads
• Drive reuse across the organization by identifying patterns in bespoke deliveries
• Set engineering standards for pipeline design, data evaluation, and delivery sign-off
• Establish FDE as the final point of control for delivery quality
• Own pipeline cost and performance including token and compute costs
• Review pipeline architecture to improve quality, cost, and reuse
• Plan and adjust capacity as priorities shift

Required qualifications

• 10+ years in software or ML engineering
• 5+ years leading multiple teams as a manager of managers
• Experience scaling an engineering organization of ~100 engineers
• Experience building and shipping AI/ML systems to production
• Experience using automated verification to decide what is good enough to ship
• Track record of hiring and scaling engineering teams through hypergrowth
• Deep technical fluency in architecture reviews and design changes
• Direct experience with LLM application stacks including agents, orchestration, and LLM-based pipelines
• Strong customer accountability

Nice to have

• Background in ML infrastructure or data platforms

About the company

Snorkel AI is a frontier AI data lab that helps teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, the company works with leading AI labs and enterprises.