FDE Lead, NYC

Description

The company has raised a $250M Series C led by a16z, with Benchmark, Lightspeed and YC returning, bringing its valuation to $2.2 billion.

It builds a search engine for AI systems. Agents, Fortune 500 companies and AI labs already use its Search API, and it aims to change a market that has barely moved since the 1990s.

The team is about 100 people, mostly in San Francisco, with backgrounds at Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and as founders or dropouts.

The team moves quickly, takes ownership, and sets egos aside. It believes this is one of the last hard problems worth solving well.

This role sits in the New York office and leads the US East Forward Deployed Engineering team. Your group takes over once a deal closes: moving customers to production fast, embedding the product in their stack, and growing accounts or opening new use cases. Success is measured in revenue, specifically retention and expansion across your accounts.

Responsibilities

• Recruit, onboard, coach and manage the US East FDE team in New York.
• Own the results on your team's accounts, from first production launch through adoption, consumption growth, retention and expansion, working alongside Account Executives.
• Track the team's numbers weekly with the Americas FDE Leader: retained and expanded revenue, time to production, consumption growth, and churn or contraction prevented.
• Stay technical: join major onboardings and escalations, review integrations, and help the team solve the hardest engineering problems.
• Run a weekly account health review and make sure every at-risk account has a plan and a named owner.
• Staff specialist requests from Solutions Architects during presales and hand deals off cleanly at close.
• Turn field work into pipeline through talks, advanced webinars on real deployments, blog posts, case studies and events.
• Pass field feedback to Product, ranking gaps by the revenue that depends on each one.

Requirements

• Several years of programming experience, including building and shipping a production server from scratch and debugging customer integrations yourself.
• Hands-on work in real codebases and production systems, ideally involving search, retrieval, LLMs or data pipelines.
• 4+ years in technical customer-facing work, such as forward deployed, customer or solutions engineering, technical consulting, or software engineering with customer ownership, including leading or mentoring engineers.
• A record of driving adoption, retention or expansion on technical accounts.
• Clear communication with CTOs, engineering leads and executives.
• Willingness to travel as customer engagements require.
• Might excel: have managed forward deployed, customer or solutions engineers as a first-line manager at an API, developer tools, AI or modern database company.
• Might excel: have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and speak credibly about retrieval and search quality.
• Might excel: do well in early-stage settings where the role changes monthly.
• Might excel: care about organizing the world's knowledge so machines can access it.

Conditions

The role is in person at the New York office.

Visa sponsorship is available for international candidates, including STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1 and E3.

Benefits

• Premium medical, dental and vision coverage.
• Fertility benefits.
• A monthly wellness stipend for all employees.