Forward Deployed Engineer Lead
First seen by Alion on Oct 16, 2026.
Lead and build the team:
- Manage and coach the current FDEs: set priorities, give feedback, and support their growth along the FDE 1, 2, and 3 ladder.
- Plan the team's growth from two to four or five, define the profile for each hire, and run the hiring process with HR.
- Decide which departments get an FDE next and how each deployment is set up.
- Run the weekly FDE sync and the monthly demo, and keep FDE work visible across the company.
- Help engineers from other tech roles (developers, QA, security, DevOps, data) rotate into FDE and back, with clear handovers.
Deliver hands-on:
- Embed with a department, baseline where manual hours go, and ship standalone solutions with Apps Script, Python, Virohan GPT, our APIs, and AI Studio apps.
- Take on the hardest or most ambiguous problems yourself, and show the team what good looks like.
- Maintain what you build and write the README for every solution.
Partner with departments:
- Build trust with department heads and product heads in Sales, Academics, and beyond.
- Agree on priorities, set honest expectations about what an FDE will and will not do, and say no when a request belongs with the product team.
- Measure results with the business owner of each solution.
Keep quality and security high without slowing the team down:
- Work with the cybersecurity engineer to keep the FDE Guardrails current and followed.
- Keep the Solution Registry accurate: named business owner, data touched, cost, and usage for every solution.
- Watch infra cost and flag solutions that cross the graduation threshold.
Close the loop with the SD team:
- Run the monthly registry review with Technology Head and apply the graduation criteria.
- Turn proven solutions into clear specs for the SD team: the problem, the users, the baseline, and what the FDE version taught us.
- Bring patterns across departments into product planning as evidence, not opinions.
Tech Stack:
- Python, Google Apps Script, AI Studio, Virohan GPT, APIs
Skills
Forward Deployment Engineering, Python, Engineering Management, Google App Script