Pay not posted
Forward Deployed Engineer
Published · Updated
Pay not postedNew York, NYHybrid
Leads enterprise customer engagements for an early-stage AI infrastructure team, translating customer data and deployment needs into proofs of value and production deployments.
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View posting at CleraAt a glance
Posted base pay
Not posted
Median $188K
Typical senior FDE payMiddle 50% of 1,833 postings$160K–$220KThe work
Proves it works before the sale
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
Less common in FDE jobs
- Coding work: Prototypes and scripts5%
- Covers pre-sales24%
- Hybrid34%
- Covers proofs of concept38%
Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.
The job description from Clera
Posted by Clera on
About the Role
Join an early-stage enterprise AI infrastructure team as its technical lead for customer engagements across the UK and Europe. You will connect customer needs with product and engineering, guiding enterprise deployments of AI systems that depend on reliable, governed business data.
What You'll Do
- Lead customer discovery to understand data architectures, operating constraints, and deployment requirements.
- Scope and deliver proofs of value from technical validation through production commitments.
- Run product demonstrations, address technical objections, and discuss architecture with senior engineering and business stakeholders.
- Develop repeatable materials and approaches for discovery, demonstrations, objection handling, and reference architectures.
- Turn customer edge cases and technical constraints into actionable product feedback for engineering.
- Partner with machine learning and infrastructure teams to deliver deployments aligned with customer requirements.
- Travel regularly to customer sites across the UK and Europe.
What We're Looking For
- At least 5 years of professional experience, including 2 to 3 years in hands-on engineering or data work.
- A record of personally converting enterprise B2B software proofs of value into production commitments, including experience with procurement, security reviews, and multi-stakeholder buying processes.
- Strong knowledge of data warehouses, ETL or ELT pipelines, and data governance in enterprise environments.
- Experience leading technical discovery and demos with enterprise stakeholders, and delivering proofs of concept through production deployment.
- Working knowledge of production LLM and agentic systems, including their current capabilities and limitations.
- Ability to prototype with Python or SQL and communicate customer needs clearly to engineering teams.
- Experience with knowledge graphs, semantic layers, ontologies, entity resolution, regulated or air-gapped deployments, or multiple European markets is valuable.
- Comfort with ambiguity and startup environments; multilingual ability is a plus.
Location
Hybrid, based in New York, United States, with regular travel to customer sites across the UK and Europe.
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