Head of Forward-Deployed Engineering

Location: highly prefer Austin, TX, but open to remote (This client almost always chooses local candidates to make offers to)

• They need this person to have come from startups or small SaaS companies. They aren't interested in candidates who only have enterprise-level experience at large companies.

The Role
As Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you own the technical win and the deployment that proves it. Forward Deployed Engineers are how Circuit shows up in the field: embedded with customers, building on the platform with real data, and carrying solutions from first demo through live production and measurable outcomes. You lead that team, own how Circuit is sold into technical and industrial buyers, and help set the standard for how Circuit is deployed, working alongside Engineering and Customer Success in a shared deployment and handoff motion. This is a player-coach role: part team builder, part principal FDE on the accounts that matter most. It is also a hybrid seat by design: at our stage, the person who wins the technical evaluation should be the same person who makes the deployment real, and this role carries both. This is a deeply technical seat. You will be hands-on with the product, building in Circuit, configuring environments, working with real manufacturing documents, and designing the agentic workflows that solve a customer's hardest problems. You are the person who makes the platform real in the room and holds up under scrutiny from a customer's most technical stakeholders, while developing the team so it wins without you in every room.

Productization is the name of the game. FDEs at Circuit innovate at the edge, taking on new and Client use cases in the field, then work methodically to turn what they learn into repeatable product motions and scalable engineering deployments. The best FDEs design themselves out of the processes they build, so the team is always freed up to push into the next frontier use case rather than maintaining the last one.

This role reports to the Co-Founder and CPRO.
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Enablement

• Lead, coach, and develop the Forward Deployed Engineering team, raising the technical bar so every FDE can architect agentic solutions and translate Circuit into a customer's specific workflow, outcomes, and ROI. Hire to grow the team when needed.
• Build the FDE playbook end to end, from technical discovery and qualification through solution design, POC, pilot, and production deployment.
• Develop reusable demo templates, solution patterns, and example datasets that scale the team's output.

Technical Sales & Deployment

• Partner with Account Executives on the most strategic and complex deals, owning the technical win from first demo through pilot, close, and go-live.
• Lead deep technical discovery across data, documents, workflows, and integrations, and deliver high-impact demos tailored to customer workflows and industry use cases.
• Architect, configure, and deploy agentic workflows, embedding with customers and their subject matter experts to prove out measurable outcomes in POCs, pilots, and production.
• Serve as the credible technical authority on architecture, integrations, AI capabilities, permissions, security, and deployment.

Productization & Field Insight

• Drive the edge-to-product flywheel: pioneer new use cases in the field, then work with Product and Engineering to turn them into repeatable, productized motions.
• Sequence the team's work methodically, scaling from standard use cases to new ones, balancing cutting-edge field work with scalable engineering deployment.
• Serve as a primary technical voice of the customer, synthesizing field signal, recurring patterns, and platform friction into clear, prioritized product requirements.
• Build the infrastructure that lets the team scale, including demo environments, technical qualification standards, clean handoffs to Customer Success, and success metrics across the deal and deployment lifecycle, tracked in Attio.

Experience

• 8 to 12+ years in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Presales, including time leading or mentoring other engineers.
• Proven track record owning the technical win in complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals and carrying solutions through to live production deployments, presenting credibly from engineers to executives.
• Strong technical fluency with APIs, data structures, and system architectures, comfortable writing scripts and integration code (Python, SQL, API integrations) with modern AI coding tools when a deployment needs it. This is not a software engineering role, but you should never be blocked waiting on someone else to move data or wire a prototype.
• Strong working understanding of modern AI systems, including LLMs, agentic workflows, and retrieval, and how AI-native products are architected and deployed in the enterprise.
• Demonstrated ability to build tailored demos and POC environments, and the templates and process that scale them across a team.
• Experience translating complex customer requirements into clear product or engineering inputs.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites regularly, up to 25%.
• A plus: domain expertise in industrial or manufacturing environments, including:
  • CPQ platforms (Salesforce CPQ, Oracle CPQ, Tacton, Epicor CPQ, or similar)
  • ERP systems (SAP, NetSuite, Epicor, Infor, Dynamics)
  • Configure-to-order or engineer-to-order processes
  • Takeoff and estimation workflows in construction and commercial services

Human Skills

• A player-coach at heart, energized by both winning deals and growing the people around you.
• Excellent communicator, able to guide customers and your own team through complex technical concepts.
• Highly collaborative across Sales, Product, and Engineering.
• Adaptable and energized by early-stage ambiguity and hands-on work.
• Curious and low-ego, with a learning mindset around AI, manufacturing systems, and workflows.

What We Offer

• High-caliber team of seasoned manufacturing and AI leaders.
• Build and lead the technical backbone of our GTM motion and influence the product at an early stage.
• Partner directly with the CPRO, CTO, and Sales leadership.
• Help create a category-defining platform transforming how manufacturers sell, support, and innovate.
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and employer-paid benefits.
• Flexible PTO and access to the latest AI tools.
• A values-driven culture that rewards ownership, curiosity, and velocity.