Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

About Mesh At Mesh, our mission is to enable consumers to pay and be paid with any asset. Today, trillions of dollars in tokenized assets exist but remain largely unusable for everyday commerce. Mesh is bridging this gap by making crypto payments reliable, useful, and ubiquitous. We combine a powerful orchestration engine with a seamless consumer app to unlock liquidity for the world. Backed by leading investors like SBI, Money Forward, Paradigm, Dragonfly, Galaxy, and PayPal Ventures, we are building the infrastructure for the next era of the global economy. Join us! 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 s [... source excerpt omitted ...] e 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 integr [... source excerpt omitted ...] 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