Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)
Beacon Software1 day ago
Toronto, Canada +2 moreStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the FDE doctrine, ensuring engagements are scoped, outcome-driven, time-boxed, and contribute reusable platform capabilities.
- Allocate approximately 1,000 engineering weeks annually across pods based on measurable business outcomes, ownership, baselines, and deployment feasibility.
- Partner with pod product leaders to maintain prioritized shared backlogs and align technical sequencing with business and go-to-market priorities.
- Serve as the intake for field patterns and guide the platform roadmap toward shared primitives and reusable workflows.
- Hire, develop, and uplevel senior generalist engineers in Toronto and San Francisco.
- Personally lead and ship one difficult deployment during the first two quarters.
Requirements
- Experience building and leading a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineering function for an AI or data platform.
- Strong generalist engineering ability, including rapidly working in unfamiliar codebases.
- Production experience shipping LLM-native software with evaluations, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking.
- Ability to establish shared backlogs and standards while preserving team effectiveness and morale.
- Strong business and operator judgment, including P&L awareness, portfolio prioritization, and collaboration with EBITDA-focused general managers.
- Clear written communication and transparent asynchronous working practices.
- Palantir-style FDE experience, private equity or holdco operating exposure, vertical SaaS experience, and experience migrating legacy stacks to shared rails are preferred.
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Beacon Software
Beacon Software acquires, operates, and grows vertical market software businesses serving Main Street sectors, offering permanent ownership rather than buy-to-flip exits and shared product, AI, and go-to-market resources. It builds an AI-native platform and provides in-house engineering to modernize portfolio products while keeping each company’s brand and customers intact. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Toronto, the company is privately held and focuses on niche operational software across the real economy.