Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Overview

Mesh is looking for an exceptional leader to build and scale our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization — a new function at the company, starting with you. We have a strong preference for someone who resides in the New York City area or San Francisco. 

Reporting to our CTO, you'll lead a team of senior engineers who embed directly with a small, capped set of our most strategic partners — exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets that drive the lion's share of our volume. These partners aren't buying a static product off the shelf. They're buying working crypto rails inside their product, against their brokers, their compliance posture, and their release schedule. The gap between a demo that works and a production integration that survives contact with a partner's environment is where deals stall, and where generic support queues and quarterly roadmap cycles fail.

Our thesis is simple: FDE sits inside Engineering, not in a services org. An FDE ships code that lands in the account and when it generalizes in our core platform. Engagements are time-boxed with a clear "ship something working end-to-end" milestone — not open-ended residencies. And the function stays deliberately small. The moment it needs a manager of managers, it has stopped being FDE and become consulting with an engineering badge. Holding that line is a core part of the job.

This role requires equal parts technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership. You need to be technical enough to earn immediate credibility with a partner's top engineers, scope an integration live on a call, and call out a bad architectural decision — but your leverage comes from the team you build and the alignment you drive, not from the code you personally write.

What You'll Do

Build and scale the FDE organization

• Define the operating model: engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar

• Hire at least 2-3 senior and staff-level generalists this year placed close to the partner engineering team and timezone they support

• Be open to running the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team

Own delivery at our most strategic accounts

• Be the person a partner's VP of Engineering or CTO calls — run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans

• Assign named owners, not a rotating pool: one engineer or small pod per account, with a mapped executive sponsor

• Own the qualification bar. FDE is justified when integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to the next ten partners

• Set the boundary with Customer Success, who own the relationship, and Support, who own break-fix. CS flags what an account needs; you decide whether it's an FDE build, a platform ask, or neither

• Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production — not tickets closed

Shape product and platform strategy

• Turn the sharpest signal in the company — what partners need in production — into scoped, prioritized platform input

• Enforce the productization ratchet: what's built either generalizes into our shared platform inside a defined window, or we stop re-investing in it. Guard against both failure modes — a silent per-customer fork, and a core roadmap hijacked by one-off asks

• Build reference architectures, QA, and monitoring that catch failure modes inside the integration rather than in a support queue

Who You Are

Leadership and team building

• 10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams

• Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company

• A track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates

Technical credibility

• You came up as a strong backend or integrations engineer and can still read a codebase, whiteboard a system, debug a design, and review architecture alongside your team. You are not expected to be in the codebase day to day

• Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails. Our partners' engineers will spot someone learning the domain on the job in the first meeting

• A history of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production

Commercial and strategic acumen

• Strong executive presence — effective and composed in front of partner executives and our own leadership team, including when an integration is on fire

• Client-facing instincts: you like being in front of partners, can read a room, and can separate the stated ask from the real constraint

• Willingness to push back. You've declined bad requests from partners and internal stakeholders alike, and driven alignment across engineering, revenue, and product without escalating every disagreement

• Experience defining engagement models, scoping, and pricing for technical delivery work

The total annual compensation for this role is up to $600,000-$900,000, in New York or San Francisco. The compensation range provided may span multiple career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on factors including a candidate's experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location. For candidates outside of New York or San Francisco, compensation will be adjusted to reflect the applicable market and location-based pay band. The base salary range listed excludes commission (if applicable) and benefits. The pay range represents the minimum and maximum target for new-hire compensation. Actual compensation may vary and may be higher or lower depending on individual circumstances.

A note on our hiring process

For questions about our hiring process, contact [email protected].

A quick note on recruiter scams: Mesh recruiters will never ask for personal or financial information, will never contact you via personal phone calls or texts, and will never ask you to click a link or install software to "complete" an interview. All applications and interview scheduling are managed through Ashby. If someone claiming to represent Mesh asks you to do anything outside that process, please don't engage — and report it to [email protected].