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Beacon Software is an AI transformation company that owns and rebuilds vertical market software businesses on an AI-native operating platform. Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are embedded within product pods, owning customer outcomes and translating field learnings back into platform capabilities.
You will lead the entire FDE function across Beacon's portfolio, owning the people, doctrine, and strategic allocation of approximately 1,000 engineering weeks annually across multiple vertical market companies. Your core responsibilities include:
**Doctrine & Standards**: Establish and enforce FDE principles—ensuring every engagement is scoped as a discrete wedge with clear start, end, and deliverable; every deployment contributes a reusable primitive, playbook, or agent workflow back to the platform; and every engagement leaves the portfolio company's engineers more capable. You prevent work from drifting into one-off consulting.
**Capacity Allocation**: Partner with pod product leaders to allocate FDE capacity strategically across the portfolio. Decisions are gated by four criteria: a quantified business outcome, an owner at the portfolio company, a measurable baseline, and shippability within the quarter. You balance named capacity on revenue-driving anchors, time-boxed bets for evidence generation, instrumentation on cash engines, and disciplined prioritization.
**Pod Partnerships**: Build and operationalize the weekly backlog mechanism in each vertical, where product leaders bring opportunity size and GTM timing while FDEs contribute technical sequencing and platform debt. You ensure visibility, shared goals, and tight feedback loops between field deployments and platform development.
**Platform Feedback Loop**: Act as the intake for patterns emerging from customer deployments. When similar code appears across two portfolio companies, you signal the need for a shared primitive. When a workflow would materially impact a GM's metrics if removed, you champion shipping it platform-wide.
**Team Building & Coaching**: Hire and grow senior generalist engineers in Toronto and San Francisco. Beacon's leadership standard is demonstrated upleveling of others—you model and enforce this bar. You remain a player-coach, personally owning one hard deployment in your first two quarters to earn credibility and stay connected to the work.
**Requirements**
- Proven track record building and leading a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineering function at a company where the core product was an AI or data platform
- Demonstrated ability to transition a team from individual goal-setting to a shared backlog and shared standards while retaining talent
- Strong generalist engineering skills: can navigate unfamiliar codebases quickly and has shipped LLM-native production software with evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking
- Operator mindset: reads P&Ls, understands business trade-offs (e.g., churn-save vs. feature launch), and can negotiate with EBITDA-focused GMs on deployments that balance near-term and long-term value
- Ruthless prioritization: experience telling a real business with real incentives that it is not a priority this quarter, maintaining the relationship, and being proven right
- Strong written communication and transparent async work style; comfortable documenting decisions in shared channels
- Bonus qualifications: Palantir-style FDE background, private equity or holdco operating experience, vertical SaaS background, or experience migrating legacy stacks to shared platforms
