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Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

London, UK

Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

At Scale AI, we're not just building AI tools—we're pioneering the next era of enterprise AI. The world's largest enterprises are racing to deploy Generative AI into the core of their operations, and Scale is the partner that gets them there. Our Forward Deployed Engineering team sits at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding alongside customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems that drive measurable business outcomes.

We're hiring a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to oversee delivery for our largest and most strategic accounts. You'll lead a team of elite engineers who embed directly with Fortune 500 customers to ship deeply integrated AI agents—owning everything from agent design and evaluation to the backend services, data systems, and cloud infrastructure that make them production-ready. You'll partner closely with our Forward Deployed and Product teams to make sure we're shipping as efficiently as possible, turning hard-won field lessons into reusable platform capabilities that compound our velocity over time.

This is a high-autonomy, founder-mindset role. You'll own outcomes end-to-end, scale a team that can operate under pressure, and shape how AI adoption actually happens inside the world's biggest enterprises. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how durably those deployments stick, and how clearly the signal from the field sharpens our product roadmap.

You Will

  • Own delivery for our largest accounts. Lead end-to-end execution across our most strategic enterprise customers—scoping engagements, sequencing delivery, removing blockers, and making sharp trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality to drive production adoption.
  • Lead and grow the team. Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set the technical bar, establish hiring standards, and build onboarding and career frameworks that let the team scale without losing intensity.
  • Provide holistic technical oversight. Maintain a deep working understanding of every layer of what we ship—agents, models, evaluations, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure—so you can review architectures, debug production issues, and raise the quality bar across every engagement.
  • Partner with Product and core Engineering. Work closely with Forward Deployed, Product, and Platform teams to ensure we ship efficiently. Identify patterns across engagements and codify them into reusable platform capabilities, playbooks, and building blocks that make the next deployment faster than the last.
  • Engage directly with customer leadership. Forge trusted relationships with senior stakeholders at Fortune 500 customers. Translate ambiguous business problems into concrete technical roadmaps with measurable outcomes, and represent Scale at the executive level.
  • Enforce production excellence. Set and hold the standard for reliability, security, observability, and evaluation across deployed agents—making sure the systems we ship are genuinely enterprise-ready, not just demo-ready.
  • Drive the feedback loop into product. Translate field insights into sharp, actionable input for Product and Research, influencing model choices, platform features, and roadmap priorities.
  • Operate with founder mindset. Own outcomes without waiting to be asked. Move with urgency in ambiguous environments. Make sound calls under pressure and model the calm, focus, and judgment the team needs when stakes are high.

Ideally You’d Have

  • 10+ years of software engineering or technical delivery experience, including 3+ years leading high-performing customer-facing engineering teams (Forward Deployed, Solutions Engineering, Applied AI, or similar).
  • A solid engineering background. You've led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production, and you're still comfortable whiteboarding system architectures, reviewing code, and debugging production issues alongside your team.
  • Proven ability to scale a delivery team. You've built hiring bars, onboarding programs, and operating standards for technical organizations, and you've interviewed and hired at volume for senior engineering roles.
  • Hands-on fluency with the full AI stack. Deep familiarity with LLMs and agent systems, evaluation frameworks, backend and API design (Python or TypeScript), data systems (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including Kubernetes, Docker, and IaC tooling.
  • Experience deploying AI into complex enterprise environments, including navigating security reviews, identity/SSO, data residency, legacy integrations, and compliance requirements.
  • A track record of turning field work into product leverage. You've codified repeatable patterns from customer engagements into tools, libraries, or platform features that scaled across the next wave of deployments.
  • Strong cross-functional leadership. You've aligned Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and Customer Success around shared goals and delivered outcomes that required all of them to row in the same direction.
  • Founder mindset. High autonomy, high motivation, high ownership. Comfortable operating with ambiguity, bias toward action, and the judgment to know when to ship and when to raise the bar.

Exceptional communication. You can translate technical tradeoffs into decisions for executive and non-technical audiences, and model the customer empathy you expect from your team.

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us:

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Cisco, DLA Piper, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status. 

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision. 

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