Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
Remote • London, UK
Posted 2mo ago
Job Location
London, UK
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Scale AI is seeking a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to lead delivery for their largest and most strategic enterprise accounts. This role involves embedding elite engineers with Fortune 500 customers to ship deeply integrated AI agents, overseeing everything from agent design and evaluation to the backend services, data systems, and cloud infrastructure required for production readiness. The Director will partner closely with Product and core Engineering teams to ensure efficient delivery, translating field learnings into reusable platform capabilities. This is a high-autonomy, founder-mindset position focused on owning outcomes end-to-end, scaling a high-performing team, and shaping enterprise AI adoption.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end delivery for the largest enterprise accounts, managing scope, speed, and quality.
- Lead, hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers.
- Provide holistic technical oversight across agents, models, evaluations, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
- Partner with Product and core Engineering to ensure efficient shipping and codify field insights into reusable platform capabilities.
- Engage directly with customer leadership to build trusted relationships and translate business problems into technical roadmaps.
- Enforce production excellence in reliability, security, observability, and evaluation for deployed agents.
- Drive feedback from field insights into Product and Research to influence roadmap priorities.
- Operate with a founder mindset, taking ownership and acting with urgency in ambiguous environments.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering or technical delivery experience.
- 3+ years leading high-performing customer-facing engineering teams (Forward Deployed, Solutions Engineering, Applied AI, or similar).
- Experience leading high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production.
- Proven ability to scale a delivery team, including building hiring bars, onboarding programs, and operating standards.
- Hands-on fluency with LLMs and agent systems, evaluation frameworks, backend and API design (Python or TypeScript).
- Familiarity with data systems (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and IaC tooling.
- Experience deploying AI into complex enterprise environments, navigating security, identity, data residency, and compliance.
- Track record of turning field work into product leverage by codifying repeatable patterns.
- Strong cross-functional leadership skills, aligning Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and Customer Success.
- Exceptional communication skills, able to translate technical tradeoffs for executive and non-technical audiences.