Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

About Chalk

Chalk is building the data platform that powers the future of machine learning applications. We tear down complexity, latency, and scale barriers that have traditionally constrained ML capabilities. Our platform combines Rust-speed performance with elegant tools that developers love to use. Leading companies depend on Chalk for everything from stopping fraudulent credit card swipes, verifying identities, and maximizing clean energy capture. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A , led by Felicis.

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineering is where Chalk meets its customers. Our FDEs are exceptional software engineers who integrate Chalk’s platform with the best ML and engineering teams in healthcare, finance, and consumer technology — running technical pilots that win deals, onboarding new customers, and engineering feature pipelines that power use cases like fraud prevention, cancer detection, and product recommendation.

Working directly with our founders, you'll lead this team and define its future. You'll own the strategy for how Chalk engages customers technically — from pre-sales pilots through onboarding, support, and expansion — and build the organization, processes, and playbooks that let the function scale with our growth. FDE is one of the most strategically important and fastest-growing functions at Chalk, and this role will shape what it becomes.

We're in the office 5 days a week. When unavoidable conflicts come up, we’re flexible. This is not a hybrid role.

What you will do

Lead, develop, and retain Chalk's team of Forward Deployed Engineers across New York and San Francisco, and own an aggressive hiring plan as the team scales

Define the strategy and operating model for the FDE function: engagement models, account coverage, the pre-sales/post-sales balance, and how FDEs drive expansion within accounts

Own the systems that make the team run — support triage and rotations, escalation paths to Engineering, onboarding playbooks, and the processes for rolling out platform changes to customer environments

Partner closely with Sales and GTM leadership on technical pilots, evaluations, and the technical strategy behind our most important deals

Partner with Engineering leadership to channel customer learnings into the product roadmap and to sharpen the internal tooling FDEs rely on

Stay hands-on: dive into customer architectures, unblock hard technical problems, and set the technical bar for the team

Serve as an executive-level technical counterpart to customer leadership at our largest accounts

Define career paths and growth trajectories for FDEs, and champion the function's identity as we grow — deeply technical engineers embedded with customers, not sales engineering

What we're looking for

10+ years of engineering experience with 3+ years leading customer-facing engineering teams (forward deployed, solutions architecture, field engineering, or similar)

Strong hands-on technical skills — proficient in Python and SQL, comfortable going deep on customer architectures and data infrastructure

Experience across both pre-sales and post-sales complex enterprise motions: technical pilots and evaluations as well as onboarding, support, and account expansion

Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain exceptional engineers, including senior ICs

Previous experience at an early-stage, high-growth startup

Executive-level communicator who can bridge technical, business, and customer contexts

Experience building the processes and playbooks that let a customer-facing engineering team scale

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Bonus points

Previous experience as a forward deployed engineer or FDE leader at a high-growth startup

Experience building production ML systems, ML infrastructure, or data platforms

Experience scaling a customer-facing engineering function from single-digit to multi-team

Experience working with enterprise customers in regulated industries (fintech, healthcare)