> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/47c6797aead04cf6

Chalk posts a director FDE role to lead deployment teams in San Francisco, CA, at $300,000–$350,000 base, above the staff+ FDE median of $225,000 across 388 postings with pay. Leads Chalk’s Forward Deployed Engineering organization, setting its customer engagement strategy and building the hiring, operating processes, and career paths needed to scale. Read from the employer’s posting on November 6, 2026.

- [Chalk](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/chalk)

Posted Sep 4, 2026 by Chalk · open on Ashby as of Nov 6, 2026

**$300,000–$350,000** + equity San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time

Leads Chalk’s Forward Deployed Engineering organization, setting its customer engagement strategy and building the hiring, operating processes, and career paths needed to scale.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F47c6797aead04cf6&placement=top)
- [View posting at Chalk](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/chalk/2f5141dc-b05b-4ece-8b71-fad8a4948ce6/application)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$300K–$350K Above the median

Midpoint $325K · median $225K

This job $300K to $350K. Staff+ FDE postings, 388 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $197K to $262K, median $225K.

### The work

Leads the deployment team

Balance **Mixed**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales
2. Proof of concept
3. Implementation
4. Operations

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: External customers

- **Level**: Staff+

- **Role**: People manager

### What they ask for

Experience

- **10+ years** engineering experience
- **3+ years** leading customer-facing engineering teams

Background

- **Software engineering**
- **Solutions and customer engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 3+ years. How many do you have?

The posting reads as a staff-level role. What level are you at now?

The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: San Francisco, CA

- **Work arrangement**: On-site

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

## More like this

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### [Head of Deployed Engineering](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/f2bf39c185070fc9)

San Francisco, CA Remote 3w ago

$240,000–$390,000

- [Other jobs at Chalk (3)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/chalk)

## The job description from Chalk

Posted by Chalk on Sep 4, 2026

### About Chalk

Chalk (chalk.ai) is the platform for production AI. Trusted by enterprises including Whatnot, Grindr, Mission Lane, Turo, and Apartment List, Chalk brings together context, runtime, and learning for agents and models. Chalk’s Context Engine delivers live context by querying data across warehouses, databases, streams, and APIs, straight from the source. Chalk’s runtime powers agents and models with infrastructure and governed access to LLMs and tools. Together, these capabilities help teams build AI that understands their business, continuously improves, and runs reliably in production. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A, led by Felicis. Learn more at chalk.ai.

### About the role

Forward Deployed Engineering is where Chalk meets its customers. Our FDEs are exceptional software engineers who integrate Chalk’s platform with the best ML and engineering teams in healthcare, finance, and consumer technology — running technical pilots that win deals, onboarding new customers, and engineering feature pipelines that power use cases like fraud prevention, cancer detection, and product recommendation.

Working directly with our founders, you'll lead this team and define its future. You'll own the strategy for how Chalk engages customers technically — from pre-sales pilots through onboarding, support, and expansion — and build the organization, processes, and playbooks that let the function scale with our growth. FDE is one of the most strategically important and fastest-growing functions at Chalk, and this role will shape what it becomes.

*We're in the office 5 days a week. When unavoidable conflicts come up, we’re flexible. This is not a hybrid role.*

### What you will do

- Lead, develop, and retain Chalk's team of Forward Deployed Engineers across New York and San Francisco, and own an aggressive hiring plan as the team scales
- Define the strategy and operating model for the FDE function: engagement models, account coverage, the pre-sales/post-sales balance, and how FDEs drive expansion within accounts
- Own the systems that make the team run — support triage and rotations, escalation paths to Engineering, onboarding playbooks, and the processes for rolling out platform changes to customer environments
- Partner closely with Sales and GTM leadership on technical pilots, evaluations, and the technical strategy behind our most important deals
- Partner with Engineering leadership to channel customer learnings into the product roadmap and to sharpen the internal tooling FDEs rely on
- Stay hands-on: dive into customer architectures, unblock hard technical problems, and set the technical bar for the team
- Serve as an executive-level technical counterpart to customer leadership at our largest accounts
- Define career paths and growth trajectories for FDEs, and champion the function's identity as we grow — deeply technical engineers embedded with customers, not sales engineering

### What we're looking for

- 10+ years of engineering experience with 3+ years leading customer-facing engineering teams (forward deployed, solutions architecture, field engineering, or similar)
- Strong hands-on technical skills — proficient in Python and SQL, comfortable going deep on customer architectures and data infrastructure
- Experience across both pre-sales and post-sales complex enterprise motions: technical pilots and evaluations as well as onboarding, support, and account expansion
- Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain exceptional engineers, including senior ICs
- Previous experience at an early-stage, high-growth startup
- Executive-level communicator who can bridge technical, business, and customer contexts
- Experience building the processes and playbooks that let a customer-facing engineering team scale
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

### Bonus points

- Previous experience as a forward deployed engineer or FDE leader at a high-growth startup
- Experience building production ML systems, ML infrastructure, or data platforms
- Experience scaling a customer-facing engineering function from single-digit to multi-team
- Experience working with enterprise customers in regulated industries (fintech, healthcare)

[View posting at Chalk](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/chalk/2f5141dc-b05b-4ece-8b71-fad8a4948ce6/application)

## About Chalk

Compute-first feature platform for AI and ML teams that defines features once, serves them in real time, and keeps training and inference consistent.

Series A · 50–100 people

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- [Compare staff+ FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/staff)
- [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area)
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