Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Forward Deployment Engineer roles sit at a distinctive intersection in SaaS: they bring product capability into real customer environments and turn adoption blockers into working systems. In an AI platform context like Dialpad’s, that typically means translating operational needs into deployable agentic workflows, where success is measured by production outcomes rather than prototypes. The listing signals a high-touch, enterprise-facing motion, with the engineer acting as both technical authority and implementation partner across strategic accounts.
From a SaaS career standpoint, this kind of position builds uncommon leverage. It develops fluency in the full loop from pre-sales evaluation through post-sales deployment, while sharpening judgment around integration trade-offs, security constraints, and how platform limitations surface in the field. The feedback channel back to product and engineering is also meaningful experience for anyone aiming to influence roadmap direction through concrete customer signal.
This role tends to fit engineers who enjoy ambiguity and stakeholder-heavy problem solving, and who want their work to be visible in customer results. It is well aligned to professionals who like combining hands-on build work with consultative communication, and who are comfortable being accountable for delivery in complex environments.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Why Dialpad
Dialpad’s Agentic AI platform turns conversations into autonomous workflows that drive revenue, efficiency, and unforgettable customer experiences. Fortune 1000 companies trust our AI Voice & Digital Agents to resolve millions of interactions every day. We’re scaling fast and need Forward Deployed Engineers who want to be at the intersection of innovation and business impact.
Your Role
The primary purpose of our Forward Deployed Engineering team is to accelerate the adoption and realization of value from our AI platform by embedding within our most strategic customer accounts. You will be the crucial link that translates complex business challenges into production ready, high-impact Agentic AI systems, driving business outcomes. FDE’s will act as the company's most technically fluent business consultant and the customer's most trusted AI architects.
What We Do
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Business Translation and Discovery: Rapidly embed with customer stakeholders and operational leaders to deeply understand their most complex, high-stakes business problems. Translate ambiguous business objectives into clear, shippable Agentic AI-powered solutions.
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The Go-To-Market Bridge: Partner directly with our Sales, Sales Engineers, Professional Services and Customer Success teams to serve as the deep technical authority during critical pre-sales evaluations and post-sales deployments. You don't just sell the vision, you build the capability that validates the investment.
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Product Alignment and Influence: Capture common customer pain points, successful integration patterns, and platform limitations discovered in the field. Synthesize and deliver this critical, high-value signal directly back to our core Product and Engineering teams to influence the product roadmap and accelerate feature development.
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AI Envisioning: Navigate complex enterprise infrastructure (cloud, on-prem, data pipelines) to integrate our platform. Guide customers on production grade Agentic bot builds and integration to custom data connectors, orchestration logic, and full-stack systems that bring AI to life.
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Agentic AI Design: Design and deploy complex multi-agent systems, architectures, and fine-tuned models tailored to the customer's unique data, domain, and security requirements. Author multi‑step prompts, retrieval pipelines, and decision logic that plug into CRMs, ERPs, and custom APIs via our MCP framework.
About You
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4+ years of experience in a high-impact, customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineering, Technical Consulting, high touch Sales Engineering or Solutions Architecture, or technical consulting for SaaS/AI products.
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Deep, demonstrable expertise in the modern AI/ML stack: LLMs, Generative AI concepts, vector databases, and agent orchestration frameworks. Proficiency in Python, Go, JS/TS plus hands‑on experience with LLM frameworks.
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Unrivaled Business Acumen: The ability to simplify technical complexity and communicate clear trade-offs, value propositions, and project plans to both a core engineering team and a non-technical C-suite executive.
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You thrive in ambiguity, take full ownership of outcomes, and are driven by delivering tangible, measurable results for the customer, often working under tight timelines.
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Contributor to a dynamic team culture, focused on high growth industry innovation, team collaboration, customer success, and having fun.
Bonus Points
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Telephony stack knowledge (WebRTC, SIP, SBCs).
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Experience deploying chatbots or voice bots at >10K daily conversations.
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Contributions to open‑source AI agent frameworks.
How We Work
Our values mirror those of top forward‑deployed orgs: Customer First, Relentless Momentum, Extreme Ownership, and One Team. We ship, learn, and iterate - fast.
