Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the engineering team that unblocks high-priority, customer-facing work for Handshake AI's most strategic partners. FDEs are technical builders: they ship end-to-end solutions in close collaboration with researchers, operators, and partner technical teams. As Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, you sit at the intersection of technical leadership and people management keeping one hand on the hardest customer problems while building and developing a team of 10 engineers across multiple engagements. You'll stay technically engaged, writing code and designing systems alongside your team, but your primary leverage is creating the conditions for exceptional engineering: setting the technical and operational standard for the FDE organization, shaping strategy and structure, and growing the people who deliver it. This is a player-coach role at scale. You lead by example technically, develop strong TLMs and senior ICs beneath you, and build the systems and playbooks that make the team compounding. The best person for this job knows when to step in, reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and rolling up their sleeves on the hardest problems, and when to step back and let the team they've built carry the weight. Location: San Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in-office