Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, Scale AI
Salary not provided
MongoDB
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
TypeScript
GCP
Python
Postgres
Azure
DynamoDB
Expert level
London
Training and validation data for AI applications
Be an early applicant
Training and validation data for AI applications
1001+ employees
B2BArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechRoboticsComputer VisionMachine LearningSaaS
Be an early applicant
Salary not provided
MongoDB
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
TypeScript
GCP
Python
Postgres
Azure
DynamoDB
Expert level
London
1001+ employees
B2BArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechRoboticsComputer VisionMachine LearningSaaS
Company mission
To develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of software engineering or technical delivery experience, including 3+ years leading high-performing customer-facing engineering teams (Forward Deployed, Solutions Engineering, Applied AI, or similar)
- A solid engineering background. You've led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production, and you're still comfortable whiteboarding system architectures, reviewing code, and debugging production issues alongside your team
- Proven ability to scale a delivery team. You've built hiring bars, onboarding programs, and operating standards for technical organizations, and you've interviewed and hired at volume for senior engineering roles
- Hands-on fluency with the full AI stack. Deep familiarity with LLMs and agent systems, evaluation frameworks, backend and API design (Python or TypeScript), data systems (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including Kubernetes, Docker, and IaC tooling
- Experience deploying AI into complex enterprise environments, including navigating security reviews, identity/SSO, data residency, legacy integrations, and compliance requirements
- A track record of turning field work into product leverage. You've codified repeatable patterns from customer engagements into tools, libraries, or platform features that scaled across the next wave of deployments
- Strong cross-functional leadership. You've aligned Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and Customer Success around shared goals and delivered outcomes that required all of them to row in the same direction
- Founder mindset. High autonomy, high motivation, high ownership. Comfortable operating with ambiguity, bias toward action, and the judgment to know when to ship and when to raise the bar
- Exceptional communication. You can translate technical tradeoffs into decisions for executive and non-technical audiences, and model the customer empathy you expect from your team
What the job involves
- At Scale AI, we're not just building AI tools—we're pioneering the next era of enterprise AI. The world's largest enterprises are racing to deploy Generative AI into the core of their operations, and Scale is the partner that gets them there. Our Forward Deployed Engineering team sits at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding alongside customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems that drive measurable business outcomes
- We're hiring a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to oversee delivery for our largest and most strategic accounts
- You'll lead a team of elite engineers who embed directly with Fortune 500 customers to ship deeply integrated AI agents—owning everything from agent design and evaluation to the backend services, data systems, and cloud infrastructure that make them production-ready
- You'll partner closely with our Forward Deployed and Product teams to make sure we're shipping as efficiently as possible, turning hard-won field lessons into reusable platform capabilities that compound our velocity over time
- This is a high-autonomy, founder-mindset role. You'll own outcomes end-to-end, scale a team that can operate under pressure, and shape how AI adoption actually happens inside the world's biggest enterprises. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how durably those deployments stick, and how clearly the signal from the field sharpens our product roadmap
- Own delivery for our largest accounts. Lead end-to-end execution across our most strategic enterprise customers—scoping engagements, sequencing delivery, removing blockers, and making sharp trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality to drive production adoption
- Lead and grow the team. Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set the technical bar, establish hiring standards, and build onboarding and career frameworks that let the team scale without losing intensity
- Provide holistic technical oversight. Maintain a deep working understanding of every layer of what we ship—agents, models, evaluations, backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure—so you can review architectures, debug production issues, and raise the quality bar across every engagement
- Partner with Product and core Engineering. Work closely with Forward Deployed, Product, and Platform teams to ensure we ship efficiently. Identify patterns across engagements and codify them into reusable platform capabilities, playbooks, and building blocks that make the next deployment faster than the last
- Engage directly with customer leadership. Forge trusted relationships with senior stakeholders at Fortune 500 customers. Translate ambiguous business problems into concrete technical roadmaps with measurable outcomes, and represent Scale at the executive level
- Enforce production excellence. Set and hold the standard for reliability, security, observability, and evaluation across deployed agents—making sure the systems we ship are genuinely enterprise-ready, not just demo-ready
- Drive the feedback loop into product. Translate field insights into sharp, actionable input for Product and Research, influencing model choices, platform features, and roadmap priorities
- Operate with founder mindset. Own outcomes without waiting to be asked. Move with urgency in ambiguous environments. Make sound calls under pressure and model the calm, focus, and judgment the team needs when stakes are high
Salary benchmarks
Our take
When training AI models, lack of access to large scale, high quality, labelled data is often the barrier preventing machine learning teams from building something great. In fact, labelled data is even more essential than the algorithms themselves. Scale AI is solving this by providing easy access through developer APIs to a huge variety of labelled data sets covering a large range of areas within computer vision and natural language processing.
It seems that almost every company now is offering artificial intelligence enabled products to automate every aspect of our lives. So, by positioning themselves as the go-to source for high quality tagged data, Scale AI is in an excellent position as the AI sector continues it's exponential growth.
With innovative AI projects across a range of sectors including retail, energy, and healthcare, Scale AI is now a leader in the industry alongside OpenAI. It continues to forge partnerships with fintech tools and software engine developers such as Brex and Luminar to continue its evolution of digital markets.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
May 2024
$1bn
SERIES F
Apr 2021
$325m
SERIES E
Total funding: $1.6bn
Company benefits
- Health & Wellbeing: Our holistic approach to supporting Scaliens includes comprehensive health coverage, dental and vision insurance, mental healthcare services, and more. PTO policies and accommodating schedules ensure you’ll get time off when you need it to relax and recharge. Note that our offerings may vary by region as we strive to respond to the unique needs of Scaliens around the globe.
- Personal & Career Growth: Continuously learn and grow through annual learning & development stipend, attending leadership breakfasts, manager training, speaker series, and joining an ERG.
- Building Scale Community: We welcome guests to our offices, and you can expect to see Scalien families and friends around. Join local happy hours, and accept invites to game nights, book clubs, and many other employee-led community events.
- Parental Support: Balancing work and family is essential, and Scale understands the importance of having adequate leave policies in place to promote a healthy home and work life.
Company HQ
Rincon Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Alexandr Wang
(Founder & CEO)Previously, Alexandr was an Algorithm Developer at Hudson River Trading, a Tech Lead and Quora and a Software Engineer at Addepar.
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