Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

About the role

deepset is hiring a Manager to lead its Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Customer Engineering. The manager builds a healthy, high-trust team and makes sure it delivers deepset's AI Platform into enterprise and public sector production environments, on target and on quality. The role is remote-first and based in Berlin.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and develop the team across the four FDE profiles (Advisory, Builder, Operating, Support), fostering a safe space where engineers share patterns instead of working in silos
• Run 1:1s and career conversations, and build the hiring and onboarding pipeline for a remote-first, async-heavy team
• Clear blockers quickly and escalate unresolved ones before they become delivery risks
• Staff the right FDE profile to the right engagement, protect against burnout and idle capacity, and deliver engagements on scope and plan
• Review architecture and solution decisions across RAG pipelines, retrieval quality, deployment topology and production operations
• Resolve customer escalations and partner with the Delivery Lead and Value Engineers on scope, feasibility and staffing
• Share field insight with Product and Engineering and build reusable patterns that reduce custom work

Required profile

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering, professional services or delivery teams in enterprise software, AI or infrastructure
• Strong coaching instincts and commercial awareness of how scope, staffing and execution affect utilization, revenue and margin
• Clear written and verbal communication with technical and executive audiences, and comfort with ambiguity in a remote-first setup
• Nice to have: experience in a SaaS or platform company moving toward enterprise and self-hosted deployments, OKR frameworks and squad-based delivery, and familiarity with agent-based systems, LLM platforms and AI-native tooling

Required skills

• RAG (retrieval, embeddings, re-ranking, evaluation)
• Cloud and self-hosted deployments, model optimization, APIs and integrations
• IAM and security fundamentals

What we offer

• Remote-first setup with flexible hours and technology of your choice
• 30 days vacation plus extra days for family sick leave
• Competitive salary and stock options
• Monthly sports and mental health support allowance, annual learning and development budget
• Monthly team socials and in-person meetups, dog-friendly Berlin HQ