{"id":437792,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering","title":"Head of Forward Deployed Engineering","company":{"id":171811,"name":"Zep","domain":"getzep.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zep-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":220000,"max":270000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":270000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":11,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"ActiveCampaign","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Dropbox","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Scale AI","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Zscaler","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-06T07:14:52Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T01:14:48Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":59,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":59},"description":"Zep manages, governs, and serves agent memory at enterprise scale. Enterprises build on Zep to run reliable, personalized agents across the business: millions of Context Graphs, served in under 200ms, inside their own VPCs and cloud deployments. Customers include Zscaler, Samsung, Twin Health, HoneyBook, and NASDAQ 100 and Fortune 500 technology companies. We also build Graphiti, our open-source context graph framework (30K+ GitHub stars). Getting Zep into production in customer environments is its own engineering problem, and you own it.\nYou will lead our deployments and build the team that runs them. The first year is hands-on. You will be in architecture reviews and in our codebase, and on site when a deployment needs you. Our engineers work deployments alongside you, so you are never the only technical person on the call.\nWe're hiring an engineer and leader who has done this work and can now set the standard for how we do it.\nThis is note a core product engineering role. You should have significant customer-facing experience in an FDE, sales engineering, or field engineering role.\nWe will measure you on time from signature to production, and on custom engineering per deployment.\nYou’ll report to our founder, Daniel (2x founder, engineer, former head of ML at SparkPost), and join a team with pedigree at Scale AI, Dropbox, ActiveCampaign, DroneDeploy, and McKinsey.\nHow we work\nWe're a small, distributed team that works closely together. We pair on hard problems, review each other's designs, and treat learning as part of the job rather than something that happens after hours. We ask a lot of questions: of customers, of teammates, of our own assumptions. When we find pain, we go fix it.\nWe expect the same back: ask questions early, push back when you disagree, and care about the people on the other end of the API.\nWhat you'll do\nOwn the technical outcome for our largest accounts, from the first architecture conversation through 90 days in production.\nWrite code. Integration work, reference architectures, deployment tooling, and fixes in the product itself.\nDeploy Zep inside customer infrastructure across Managed, BYOK, and BYOC, and work directly with the platform and security teams who have to approve it.\nDefine the engagement model. Decide which accounts get embedded support, and set how that work is scoped and priced.\nHire the team. You define the bar and lead the engineers you bring in.\nReduce the custom work each deployment takes. What you build twice becomes a reference architecture or a product requirement.\nTake what you learn in production back into the roadmap. You will be in planning with the engineers who can act on what you bring.\nYour first 90 days\nYou start inside a live deployment: shipping code, meeting the customers we already serve, and learning how Zep runs in their environments. By day 60 you own every active deployment. By day 90 you have written the first version of the engagement model.\nWhat we're looking for\n10+ years across software engineering, forward deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or sales engineering, with several of those years as a hands-on engineer.\nYou have taken enterprise deployments from first call to production under a security review and a fixed deadline.\n3+ years leading customer-facing technical people, or a clear case for why you are ready to.\nStrong Python, plus Go or TypeScript. You will read our codebase and send patches.\nYou have shipped a non-trivial agentic system to production. Not a prototype, not a thin wrapper over a chat-completion API.\nComfortable in customer infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and the identity and encryption work a BYOC install requires.\nYou raise risks early, including when it is inconvenient for the person you are talking to.\nThis role is probably NOT a fit if:\nYou have run a professional services P&L and think of this as a delivery org.\nYour customer-facing work ends with the technical win and a handoff at signature.\nYou haven't written production code in several years and don't intend to start again.\nYou need an established playbook or sign-off before you move.\nWe respect your time and keep our interview process tight and focussed.\nScreening Call (w/ Daniel, our Founder)\n→ Team Calls (2-3 hours back-to-back, including a deployment scenario walkthrough)\n→ Decision Call (Daniel, again)","description_format":"text","description_chars":4360,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":11,"management_years_min":3,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents","Knowledge Graphs"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T07:14:52Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":33,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.726,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":58,"expected_fill_days":36,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":270000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T02:03:43Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2659,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":171811},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=171811"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzep-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":437792}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"getzep.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":437792},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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