FDE Lead

We're hiring an FDE Lead to own strategic enterprise deployments and help shape the forward deployment function at GreyLabs AI. This is a player-coach role where you'll lead complex customer engagements, act as the senior technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and mentor FDEs on technical execution and customer management.

You'll work closely with banking ops leaders, CTO offices, product heads, engineering, product, sales, and customer success to drive deployments from solution design through go-live and production. The role demands strong technical depth, customer ownership, mentoring ability, and the commercial instinct to understand what enterprise customers actually need and translate that into scalable solutions.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Own Strategic Enterprise Accounts:

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of high-value, strategic, and complex enterprise accounts.
• Act as the senior technical point of contact for key customers across banks, insurers, NBFCs, and fintechs.
• Lead architecture and integration discussions, technical workshops, solution reviews, and executive-level customer conversations.
• Build strong relationships with CTO offices, engineering teams, business heads, operations leaders, and product stakeholders.
• Understand customer business problems and translate them into scalable technical solutions.
• Drive complex deployments from requirement discovery through integration, go-live, and production stabilization.
• Participate in pre-sales conversations where technical complexity, integrations, or enterprise requirements warrant senior involvement.
• Own customer escalations and drive them to resolution while maintaining trust and long-term relationships.

Mentor and Enable FDEs:

• Mentor FDEs on technical problem-solving, customer communication, solution design, and deployment execution.
• Review solution approaches, architecture decisions, and integration designs before implementation or go-live.
• Coach FDEs through complex customer situations and technical escalations.
• Share learnings from strategic accounts to improve how the broader FDE team approaches similar deployments.
• Raise the technical and execution standards across the FDE function without becoming a bottleneck for the team.

Systematize What Works:

• Reduce time-to-go-live across the portfolio by identifying recurring friction points in every implementation and fixing the root cause, not just the instance.
• Build reusable assets that make the team faster without cutting corners: integration playbooks, reference architectures, implementation templates, and internal tooling.
• Establish clear delivery standards, milestones, review mechanisms, and escalation criteria.
• Identify patterns across strategic accounts and turn them into repeatable deployment practices.

Close the Loop with Tech:

• Turn field patterns into product input. Individual FDEs surface insights; you make sure those insights are prioritized, structured, and acted on.
• Identify where platform gaps are slowing deployments and advocate for fixes that improve every future deployment, not just the current one.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to influence platform improvements based on real customer needs.

Stay Technical When It Matters:

• Review customer integrations before they go live, weigh in on architectural decisions where the stakes are high, and write code when the situation genuinely calls for it.
• Be the person who can read a production issue, understand what broke and why, and make a judgment call; not just escalate it.
• Stay hands-on with APIs, integrations, data flows, workflows, and production troubleshooting.

Requirements:

• 5-8 years of experience in technical roles, with a meaningful portion in customer-facing delivery; forward deployment, solutions engineering, implementation leadership, or technical consulting.
• Experience owning complex enterprise accounts and technical deployments end-to-end.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with system integration: REST APIs, webhooks, authentication patterns, and data pipelines; you can review an integration design and spot the problem before it reaches production.
• Comfortable in front of enterprise stakeholders at multiple levels, from engineering teams to business ops leads, and experienced enough to know that what the customer asks for and what they need are often different things.
• Track record of improving delivery: reduced onboarding timelines, reusable frameworks, or repeatable processes you built that made a team faster, not just a single engagement better.
• Experience mentoring technical ICs/FDEs and helping them develop their technical and customer-facing capabilities.
• Strong ownership mindset; you hold yourself accountable for customer outcomes across strategic accounts, not just individual tasks.

Strong Signals:

• You've led complex FDE, implementation engineering, solutions, or customer engineering engagements, ideally at a SaaS company deploying into enterprise environments with real integration complexity.
• You've been the senior technical owner for strategic enterprise accounts, managing ambiguity and driving outcomes across multiple stakeholders.
• You've been the senior technical voice in a customer escalation, held the relationship, resolved the issue, and come out with more trust than you went in with.
• You've built something field-specific, a playbook, a reusable integration, and an internal tool that measurably improved the team's next five engagements.
• You've mentored engineers/FDEs and helped them independently handle increasingly complex technical and customer situations.
• You understand BFSI, not necessarily as a domain expert, but enough to move quickly in environments where compliance, data sensitivity, and enterprise procurement timelines are real constraints.
• You find voice AI, conversational systems, and real-time customer interaction infrastructure genuinely interesting, not just a category you've landed in.