Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
Mesh Connect · New York City
Overview
Mesh is looking for an exceptional leader to build and scale our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization — a new function at the company, starting with you. We have a strong preference for someone who resides in the New York City area or San Francisco.
Reporting to our CTO, you'll lead a team of senior engineers who embed directly with a small, capped set of our most strategic partners — exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets that drive the lion's share of our volume. These partners aren't buying a static product off the shelf. They're buying working crypto rails inside their product, against their brokers, their compliance posture, and their release schedule. The gap between a demo that works and a production integration that survives contact with a partner's environment is where deals stall, and where generic support queues and quarterly roadmap cycles fail.
Our thesis is simple: FDE sits inside Engineering, not in a services org. An FDE ships code that lands in the account and when it generalizes in our core platform. Engagements are time-boxed with a clear "ship something working end-to-end" milestone — not open-ended residencies. And the function stays deliberately small. The moment it needs a manager of managers, it has stopped being FDE and become consulting with an engineering badge. Holding that line is a core part of the job.
This role requires equal parts technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership. You need to be technical enough to earn immediate credibility with a partner's top engineers, scope an integration live on a call, and call out a bad architectural decision — but your leverage comes from the team you build and the alignment you drive, not from the code you personally write.
What You'll Do
Build and scale the FDE organization
- Define the operating model: engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar
- Hire at least 2-3 senior and staff-level generalists this year placed close to the partner engineering team and timezone they support
- Be open to running the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team
Own delivery at our most strategic accounts
- Be the person a partner's VP of Engineering or CTO calls — run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans
- Assign named owners, not a rotating pool: one engineer or small pod per account, with a mapped executive sponsor
- Own the qualification bar. FDE is justified when integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to the next ten partners
- Set the boundary with Customer Success, who own the relationship, and Support, who own break-fix. CS flags what an account needs; you decide whether it's an FDE build, a platform ask, or neither
- Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production — not tickets closed
Shape product and platform strategy
- Turn the sharpest signal in the company — what partners need in production — into scoped, prioritized platform input
- Enforce the productization ratchet: what's built either generalizes into our shared platform inside a defined window, or we stop re-investing in it. Guard against both failure modes — a silent per-customer fork, and a core roadmap hijacked by one-off asks
- Build reference architectures, QA, and monitoring that catch failure modes inside the integration rather than in a support queue
Who You Are
Leadership and team building
- 10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
- Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company
- A track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates
Technical credibility
- You came up as a strong backend or integrations engineer and can still read a codebase, whiteboard a system, debug a design, and review architecture alongside your team. You are not expected to be in the codebase day to day
- Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails. Our partners' engineers will spot someone learning the domain on the job in the first meeting
- A history of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production
Commercial and strategic acumen
- Strong executive presence — effective and composed in front of partner executives and our own leadership team, including when an integration is on fire
- Client-facing instincts: you like being in front of partners, can read a room, and can separate the stated ask from the real constraint
- Willingness to push back. You've declined bad requests from partners and internal stakeholders alike, and driven alignment across engineering, revenue, and product without escalating every disagreement
- Experience defining engagement models, scoping, and pricing for technical delivery work
The total annual compensation for this role is up to $600,000-$900,000, in New York or San Francisco. The compensation range provided may span multiple career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on factors including a candidate's experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location. For candidates outside of New York or San Francisco, compensation will be adjusted to reflect the applicable market and location-based pay band. The base salary range listed excludes commission (if applicable) and benefits. The pay range represents the minimum and maximum target for new-hire compensation. Actual compensation may vary and may be higher or lower depending on individual circumstances.