Forward Deployment Engineer Leader

Jeppesen ForeFlight builds the crew and operations software that many of the world’s leading airlines run on. Our engineers work where rules are exact and mistakes are expensive, alongside around 400 colleagues from more than 50 nations. You will be expected to make a difference.

About the Role

Every airline runs on rules: union agreements, fatigue regulations, company policy and decades of operational exceptions. Our crew and operations systems model every one of them precisely. That depth is why many of the world’s largest airlines run their operations on Jeppesen ForeFlight. It is also why a Crew Tracking implementation is measured in years.

We believe agentic AI changes that equation, and we have evidence. Our engineers already write and review crew-legality rules with Claude Code. The rules compile deterministically into our certified engine, so the engine checks everything an agent writes, and independent review catches what compiles clean but is still wrong. On one project, review caught a rule that let an illegal duty read as compliant, long before go-live. On live airline programmes, our Specification agentic system reads the source agreements clause by clause, finds what is missing before build work starts, and declines to write a requirement it cannot prove.

Now we are building the organisation that runs this at scale: a Forward Deployed Engineering team that works inside customer implementations, operates the agentic systems and builds the hardest parts directly into the product core. We are looking for the leader who will build it and own the result.

You won’t start from a blank page. The model is designed and the first deployments are under way. Your job is to test it against reality and change what the evidence says should change.

The Forward Deployed Unit. Each engagement is run by a Forward Deployed Unit (FDU): one team accountable for one customer outcome, with humans at the edges and agents in the middle. People frame the work and sign off the result, and the agents do most of the reading, reconciling, generating and testing. Some of the people come from our implementation organisation, so you lead the model and its engineering, not every person in it.

From gravel road to paved road. When an engagement hits a gap in the product, FDEs build a narrow, production-grade “gravel road” in the core. Product agrees to the change, Engineering accepts it, and the team paves it into a capability every later customer gets out of the box. FDEs are measured on what later projects never had to build, not on hours billed.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the organisation. Hire and lead a Specification Leader, a Development Leader and twelve Forward Deployed Engineers based across the world.
• Build the FDU model end to end. Run the first deployments, measure what the agentic systems handle unattended and what still needs a person, and redesign the unit based on what you find.
• Own the agentic systems as programme deliverables. You own the whole: how much they do unattended, how they are evaluated, and where people review their work.
• Make gravel-to-paved a repeatable habit. Field work merges back into the core every time. Product owns the roadmap and Engineering owns technical acceptance.
• Protect the mission. Forward-deployed capacity is not spare implementation capacity. You decide which engagements the team takes on, and which it turns down.
• Be the programme’s voice. Speak to airline executives and our own leadership, and use data to improve the programme and weigh the value created against the investment.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, shipping and running agentic systems in production, including LLM agents, evals and human-in-the-loop controls, and a clear understanding of where they break and why.
• Technical credibility to read a pull request, challenge an architecture, and debug a drifting agentic system alongside an engineer. Agentic coding tools are part of how you work every day.
• Experience leading senior engineering teams, ideally distributed or embedded with customers, and a track record of building at least one team from a standing start.
• Credibility in front of an airline’s leadership team and in front of a sceptical principal engineer.
• Comfort owning outcomes in mission-critical software, where mistakes are expensive.
• A habit of leading with evidence and setting up the measurement before claiming the result.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading or working in a forward-deployed engineering model.
• Experience in airline operations, crew management or another safety-critical domain.
• A background in optimisation, operations research, scheduling or rule-based systems.
• Nordic or broader European leadership experience.

What Success Looks Like

• 90 days: You know every engineer and every active engagement, and you have set the team structure. The baseline measurement framework is agreed, and the criteria for choosing engagements are published.
• 6 months: Hiring is well under way, and agentic system performance is reported in numbers the business can act on. The first gravel road is paved into the product core. This is a shared outcome with Product and Engineering, who own the roadmap and the acceptance.
• 12 months: You report leading indicators of shorter implementations: specification phase duration, rules per week through review, defects caught before go-live, and hours later projects did not have to be spent. You have also built a team that strong engineers want to join.

Application

Send your CV (PDF, in English) together with a short note about one agentic system you built: what it did, where it failed, and what you changed because of it.

Why You Should Join

• A founder’s mandate with backing in place. The roles are approved, the design exists and leadership is behind it. The team is yours to build.
• AI where correctness matters. You’ll work with hundreds of interacting rules, certified engines and optimisers in the agentic systems. Agents do the work, and a deterministic core underneath keeps it honest.
• A serious engineering home. Our Gothenburg office is one of the city’s largest software development organisations.

Our benefits package includes, but is not limited to:

• Medical Insurance
• Employer paid life, AD&D, and long term disability insurance
• Health and wellness reimbursement allowance
• Pension plan
• 30 paid vacation days, as well as additional days off for Christmas break
• Employee assistance program
• 2 days off to volunteer annually
• Employee referral program
• Flight rewards and flight stipend