Head of Forward Deployment Engineering - Tavily
AI summary of the role
Head of Forward Deployed Engineering for Tavily, Nebius's AI-agent search API.
What you’ll do
- Define and evolve the FDE organization's vision, operating model, execution playbooks, resourcing strategy, and quarterly priorities.
- Lead, mentor, and scale an existing team of Forward Deployed Engineers, raising the bar for hiring, technical excellence, and customer impact.
- Own technical strategy for Tavily's most strategic enterprise accounts from discovery and solution design through POCs, production rollout, and expansion.
- Stay hands-on by leading strategic customer engagements and building reference implementations, retrieval pipelines, agentic systems, and prototypes on the Tavily API.
What you’ll bring
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant customer-facing technical roles (FDE, Solutions Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer).
- 4+ years building or leading customer-facing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and organizational scaling.
- Strong hands-on engineering in Python, APIs, distributed systems, and modern software architecture.
- Deep experience designing and building production AI systems: LLM applications, agentic workflows, retrieval architectures, evaluation systems.
Technologies
Python · APIs · distributed systems · LLM · agentic workflows · retrieval architectures · evaluation systems · Tavily API · RAG · agent orchestration frameworks
About Nebius
Full-stack AI cloud infrastructure platform delivering GPU compute and software to hyperscalers and enterprises without requiring in-house AI/ML teams.
Public · 1000–2000 people
Source and classification
Production engineering · Evidence for this classification:
technical initiatives across the business. Forward Deployed Engineering owns how Tavily shows up technically in the field. The function sits at the intersection of enterprise customers, Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and strategic initiatives across the business. Its charter is to lead the technical execution of Tavily's most strategic customer initiatives—from discovery and POCs through production rollout and expansion—serving as the company's senior technical force for the highest-impact opportunities in the field. You're welcome to work remotely from within the United States, with regular presence in New York City as needed. Your responsibilities will include: Define and evolve the FDE organization's vision, operating model, execution playbooks, resourcing strategy, and quarterly priorities. Lead, mentor, and scale an existing team of Forward Deployed Engineers
More from the job description
About Nebius: Nebius is leading a new era in cloud infrastructure for the global AI economy. We are building a full-stack AI cloud platform that supports developers and enterprises from data and model training through to production deployment, without the cost and complexity of building large in-house AI/ML infrastructure. Built by engineers, for engineers. From large-scale GPU orchestration to inference optimization, we own the hard problems across compute, storage, networking and applied AI. Listed on Nasdaq (NBIS) and headquartered in Amsterdam, we have a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, the UK, North America and Israel. Our team of 1,500+ includes hundreds of engineers with deep expertise across hardware, software and AI R&D. About Tavily: We're building the search engine for AI agents. Our API is designed from the ground up to power RAG and real-time reasoning in AI systems. By connecting LLMs to high quality, trustworthy web content, we help developers build agents that are not only intelligent, but also informed. We work with some of the most innovative teams in AI, from small startups shaping the ecosystem to the largest enterprises deploying AI at scale. Whether it's powering sales assistants, research copilots, or internal knowledge tools, we're the missing link between LLMs and the real world. The role As Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you [... source excerpt omitted ...] ating model for the next stage of scale. You'll establish how the organization hires, executes, prioritizes, and measures success, while remaining hands-on with our most strategic customer engagements. You'll partner closely with the executive team on enterprise strategy, product direction, and high-impact technical initiatives across the business. Forward Deployed Engineering owns how Tavily shows up technically in the field. The function sits at the intersection of enterprise customers, Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and strategic initiatives across the business. Its charter is to lead the technical execution of Tavily's most strategic customer initiatives—from [... source excerpt omitted ...] al force for the highest-impact opportunities in the field. You're welcome to work remotely from within the United States, with regular presence in New York City as needed. Your responsibilities will include: Define and evolve the FDE organization's vision, operating model, execution playbooks, resourcing strategy, and quarterly priorities. Lead, mentor, and scale an existing team of Forward Deployed Engineers by raising the bar for hiring, technical excellence, execution, and customer impact. Own the technical strategy for Tavily's most strategic enterprise accounts, from discovery and solution design through POCs, production rollout, and expansion. Partner closely with Sales a
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