Pay not posted
Forward Deployed Engineer
Published · Updated
Pay not postedNew York, NYHybrid
Lead customer discovery and scope proofs of value through production deployment.
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View posting at CleraAt a glance
Posted base pay
Not posted
Median $188K
Typical senior FDE payMiddle 50% of 1,748 postings$160K–$220KThe work
Builds what the customer runs
Balance
- Mostly building
- Mixed
- Mostly pre-sales or support
Project stages
- Pre-sales
- Proof of concept
- Implementation
- Operations (not covered)
Travel Required, amount not stated
- Coding
- Prototypes and scripts
- Builds for
- External customers
- Level
- Senior
- Role
- Technical lead
What they ask for
Experience
Background
Tools
Visa
Less common in FDE jobs
- Coding work: Prototypes and scripts5%
- Covers pre-sales24%
- Hybrid35%
- Covers proofs of concept39%
Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.
The job description from Clera
Posted by Clera on
About the Role
Join a small enterprise AI infrastructure team as its technical front line for customer engagements across the UK and Europe. You will connect customer needs with product and engineering work, guiding technical evaluations through deployment while helping establish the team's field playbook.
What You'll Do
- Lead customer discovery to understand data architectures, operational constraints, and opportunities for AI agents.
- Scope and deliver proofs of value from initial requirements through technical validation and production deployment.
- Run demonstrations, address technical objections, and discuss architecture with senior engineering and business stakeholders.
- Conduct technical deep-dives with data platform, infrastructure, and executive teams across European markets.
- Develop reusable discovery frameworks, demo narratives, objection handling, and reference architectures.
- Translate customer edge cases and requirements into actionable feedback for product and engineering teams.
- Partner with machine learning and infrastructure teams to deliver deployments that meet customer expectations.
What We're Looking For
- At least 5 years of professional experience, including 2 to 3 years in hands-on technical or data roles building systems.
- A record of converting technical proofs of value into production commitments in enterprise B2B software.
- Strong knowledge of data warehouses, ETL/ELT pipelines, data governance, and enterprise data architectures.
- Experience with enterprise discovery, technical demos, security reviews, procurement, and multi-stakeholder buying processes.
- Working knowledge of production LLM and agentic systems, including their capabilities and limitations.
- Ability to use Python or SQL for customer-facing prototyping and to turn technical findings into structured engineering feedback.
- Willingness to travel regularly to customer sites across the UK and Europe.
- Experience with knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, entity resolution, or regulated and air-gapped deployments is valuable. Multilingual ability, European market experience, and startup experience are also beneficial.
Compensation & Benefits
Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Hybrid, New York, United States. The role includes regular travel to customer sites across the UK and Europe.
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