Lead - Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

• Lead client engagements - drive delivery and raise the bar on what your team ships
• Partner with AI Transformation Leads to deliver software that moves client metrics
• Work with customers, consultants, and cross-functional teams to build relationships, deliver software, and spot what comes next
• Break hard engineering problems into shippable pieces and get them out the door
• Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast
• Unblock your team. Remove obstacles that slow delivery
• Build AI-powered solutions - LLMs, agents, automation. Whatever the client needs
• Feed learnings back to the platform - what worked, what broke, what to build next
• Help build the team by mentoring engineers and spotting people who can operate at this speed

Requirements

• 7-10 years of software engineering experience
• You've led a team of IC makers - dev, QA, design, PM, BA, whatever the function - and kept them shipping
• Experience building applications from scratch - language and paradigm don't matter, but discipline and craft do
• Experience solving 0-to-1 problems - identifying product-market fit, iterating with users, shipping
• Technical Skills
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and architectural judgement
• Hands-on across the full stack - front-end, back-end, data pipelines, AI models
• You understand how businesses make money with software
• Leadership & Communication
• You lead from the code. Your team sees it
• Experience mentoring engineers and growing a team
• You can explain technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, clients, and operators
• Mindset
• Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments
• Grit. You don't wait for perfect clarity to make progress
• You're comfortable in a terminal. Not a shell wizard - but you live in one, and it doesn't faze you
• At realfast, everyone codes - just like everyone communicates. You're already building small apps, scripts, or tools to make your own life better. Here you take that all the way
• You already spend hours every day using AI coding assistants - Claude Code, Codex, or the equivalent. If you don't, the pace here will feel alien
• Git is how we collaborate - not just engineers, everyone. You don't need to walk in fluent, but you need to be comfortable learning fast
• Clear, precise prose. You can reason through a problem in writing, explain your thinking to a colleague, and direct an AI agent with the same clarity. The quality of your reasoning on paper directly determines the quality of your output
• Backgrounds we'd consider
• Engineering lead or tech lead at a startup or product company who's kept a team of IC makers shipping while still writing code every day - and who's had exposure to design, sales, or client delivery alongside the engineering
• Senior developer who's led a cross-functional delivery team (dev, QA, design, BA) and elevated the craft of everyone on it - not by managing, but by setting the standard with their own work
• Full-stack engineer who's moved into a player-co

Additional Information

realfast is India's first post-AI IT services company, built from scratch around one metric: how quickly a signed contract becomes working software a client is paying for. Founded by the team that scaled Gojek and backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) and RTP Global. Our platform, Exo, powers the entire delivery operation. It ingests client documentation, codebases, and requirements within hours, compressing weeks of traditional discovery into days, then works alongside our teams to deliver production-ready solutions. We've delivered production-ready solutions in days that traditionally take months. The methodology behind this is Real Agile, built specifically for how IT services works in the AI era. We hire for judgment, because everything that doesn't require it is already automated. What's left is the job. Here's what we're looking for Everything an FDE is - a hacker-coded engineer who ships fast and understands why the business cares - but you've done it before. Shipped in ambiguous environments. Led teams through complexity. And you still write code every day. You don't just manage. You build . You'll lead a team of FDEs on client projects, working alongside AI Transformation Leads. You own high-complexity projects end-to-end - product design, technical architecture, trade-offs, delivery. The problems are messy. The timelines are aggressive. You figure it out. You're deeply embedded in client work. But you also bring back learnings, patterns, and insights that shape the platform we're building. You spend your days figuring out how to use AI agents and coding assistants to make your whole team faster .

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