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Chalk is a data platform for machine learning applications, recently raised $50M Series A led by Felicis. The company combines Rust-speed performance with developer-friendly tools, serving leading companies in fraud prevention, identity verification, and clean energy optimization.
As Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will lead Chalk's customer-facing engineering function across New York and San Francisco offices. This is a strategic, high-impact role reporting to founders, responsible for building and scaling the FDE organization from the ground up.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and develop the FDE team across two offices, owning hiring strategy and team growth
- Define the FDE operating model: engagement strategies, account coverage models, pre-sales/post-sales balance, and expansion playbooks
- Build systems and processes: support triage, escalation paths, onboarding playbooks, and customer environment rollout procedures
- Partner with Sales and GTM on technical pilots, evaluations, and deal strategy for key accounts
- Collaborate with Engineering leadership to translate customer insights into product roadmap priorities and internal tooling improvements
- Maintain hands-on technical involvement: architect customer solutions, solve complex technical problems, and set technical standards for the team
- Serve as executive-level technical advisor to leadership at major customer accounts
- Design career paths and growth frameworks for FDEs, establishing the function's identity as deeply technical engineers embedded with customers
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years of engineering experience with 3+ years leading customer-facing engineering teams (forward deployed, solutions architecture, field engineering)
- Strong Python and SQL proficiency; ability to deep-dive on customer architectures and data infrastructure
- Experience across pre-sales and post-sales enterprise motions: technical pilots, evaluations, onboarding, support, expansion
- Proven track record hiring, developing, and retaining exceptional engineers including senior individual contributors
- Background at early-stage, high-growth startups
- Executive-level communication skills bridging technical, business, and customer contexts
- Experience building scalable processes and playbooks for customer-facing engineering teams
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent
Bonus experience: FDE or FDE leadership at high-growth startups, production ML systems or ML infrastructure, scaling customer-facing engineering from single-digit to multi-team, enterprise customers in regulated industries (fintech, healthcare).
The role requires 5 days/week in-office presence in San Francisco or New York.
