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Hiya is a voice intelligence platform that helps businesses create trusted calling experiences and combat fraud. The company serves over 500 million people across 40+ countries through mobile operators, device makers, and enterprises.
You will lead Forward Engineering, a founding leadership role reporting to the CTO. This department owns the customer-facing technical integration, deployment, and support of Hiya's platform across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. You will inherit strong engineers in the US and Europe and build out the organization as the company scales globally.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow forward deployed engineering and solutions architecture teams across three regions, hiring managers and senior engineers for each market
- Own the distribution platform: hosted gateways, SDKs for partners and device makers, and tooling that enables rapid customer adaptation without product forking
- Own reliability and cost-to-serve for all live integrations; establish on-call and incident response models
- Collaborate with Product Engineering on clear boundaries between what Forward Engineering adapts for customers versus what goes into the product roadmap
- Partner with Sales and Customer Success across the full deal lifecycle—from technical pre-sales through launch, retention, and expansion—with shared accountability for outcomes
- Translate customer and partner needs into patterns for the product roadmap rather than one-off requests
- Hire, coach, and develop managers and senior engineers; maintain quality and customer trust standards across all regions
- Set departmental strategy, manage operating plan (headcount, budget, metrics), and report to leadership
- This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in the Seattle office, with 30-40% travel to customers and partners
The role sits at the intersection of customer success, product engineering, and sales. Last year the team opened twelve new operator integrations; the goal is to scale that pace significantly.
Requirements:
- 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles, with at least 4 years leading engineers and managers
- Proven track record building and leading a forward deployed, solutions, or customer engineering organization at a B2B platform company, including hiring its leaders and setting its operating model
- Experience leading both production-shipping engineers and customer-facing engineers, managing each group differently
- Ownership of a platform or integration layer that many customers depend on, including on-call, incident response, and cost management
- Direct experience working with enterprise or partner sales, sharing outcomes, and clearly communicating what can and cannot be promised to customers
- Technical depth sufficient to review architecture, critically read postmortems, and identify gaps in team analysis
- Experience leading through ambiguity at a startup or growth-stage company; ability to pivot teams quickly when facts change
- Experience leading teams that use AI coding agents in daily work, with a clear approach to maintaining quality
- Clear communication with executives, customers, and engineers; proactive issue escalation
Preferred qualifications:
- Telecom industry experience (though platform-building and customer-dependency experience is valued more highly)
- Experience with SIP or other telephony protocols, mobile SDK distribution, or carrier/communications platform integrations
- Experience running teams across US, European, or Asian time zones with follow-the-sun support models
- Experience with data residency or sovereign hosting requirements
