Director of Forward Deployed Engineering

Nebius builds the infrastructure serious AI teams run on - GPU clusters, inference runtimes, agent development environments, data pipelines - all of it purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads. What we are now building is the ecosystem function that ensures the world's best AI companies are successful on Nebius. As Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will build and scale the organization that makes those companies successful on our platform. You will recruit exceptional FDEs, establish the operating model, ensure technical excellence, and turn partner engagements into product improvements and reusable platform assets. This is not a Sales Engineering leader, Professional Services manager, or traditional Engineering manager role. It sits at the intersection of engineering leadership, AI platform architecture, ecosystem partnerships, and product strategy. You're welcome to work remotely in the United States. Your responsibilities will include: Organization Building & Talent - Build, hire, and develop a world-class Forward Deployed Engineering organization across AI applications, inference, infrastructure, and data. - Define the talent bar, team structure, career paths, and leadership expectations for the function. - Coach engineers and managers toward greater independence while maintaining a consistently high technical standard. - Build an organization and leadership system that scales without depending on individual heroics. Operating Model & Technical Excellence - Establish scalable operating models for partner engagement, technical scoping, architecture reviews, escalation, and delivery health. - Set the technical bar for integrations, proofs of concept, reference architectures, and partner assessments produced by the team. - Review architectures across AI applications, managed inference, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms, bringing in deeper experts where needed. - Balance speed with engineering quality and ensure the team builds production-quality work rather than disposable demonstrations. Executive & Ecosystem Leadership - Engage credibly with founders, CTOs, senior engineering leaders, and enterprise technical executives as Nebius's senior FDE leader. - Build trusted relationships across AI platforms, cloud providers, ISVs, open source communities, and strategic technology partners. - Represent Forward Deployed Engineering in platform planning, ecosystem strategy, and executive investment decisions. - Create a strong external technical presence through workshops, reference architectures, open source work, events, and developer advocacy. Field-to-Product & Reusable Leverage - Treat partner engagements as a continuous product discovery engine and convert field learning into roadmap priorities and shipped platform improvements. - Ensure every engagement creates reusable value through platform capabilities, reference architectures, tooling, benchmarks, documentation, or automation. - Prevent the function from becoming one-off consulting work by setting clear boundaries and rewarding reusable outcomes. - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to close the loop on recurring friction and improve the experience for customers beyond the original engagement. We expect you to have: - 12-18+ years of experience across engineering, solutions architecture, customer engineering, field engineering, or forward deployed engineering. - 3-7+ years leading technical field organizations, including experience building a new function or materially scaling an existing team. - A strong record of hiring, coaching, and scaling Customer Engineering, FDE, Solutions Architecture, or Field CTO teams. - Earlier hands-on engineering experience in cloud, infrastructure, AI, or developer platforms. - Technical judgment to review and elevate architectures across AI applications, inference, infrastructure, and data platforms. - A proven track record of converting customer and partner feedback into shipped platform improvements. - Executive presence and credibility as a trusted advisor to founders, CTOs, and enterprise technical executives. - Experience leading across cloud providers, AI platforms, ISVs, open source communities, and strategic technology partners. - The ability to hire experts, evaluate their work, and set a high technical standard without needing to be the deepest specialist in every domain. It will be an added bonus if you have: - Strong relationships across the AI and cloud ecosystem. - Public technical leadership through talks, workshops, reference architectures, open source projects, or developer advocacy. - Built a Forward Deployed Engineering, Customer Engineering, or Field Engineering organization from zero to one. - Scaled a technical field organization across regions or ecosystem domains without lowering the hiring or engineering bar. - Experience as a founder, VP Engineering, Field CTO, Head of Customer Engineering, or early FDE leader. - Led production architecture and execution for demanding AI application, training, inference, or platform workloads.