Head of Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE)

About Parloa

Parloa’s mission is to make every customer conversation feel effortless for both customers and the companies serving them. As agentic AI accelerates, Parloans are shaping the foundation of a new era in customer experience, one where customer support is no longer transactions, but meaningful exchanges. It is not just a vision; Parloa has powered over ONE BILLION interactions between global enterprise brands and their customers, with companies like Booking.com, HealthEquity, Allianz, SAP, BarmeniaGothaer, and TUI already deploying Parloa at scale. 

About the role:

As Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, AMER (FDE) at Parloa, you own the success of enterprise AI deployments. Your mission is to build and lead a world-class FDE organization that delivers predictable, high-quality, and scalable enterprise implementations—while continuously feeding field insight back into product and platform evolution.

You are responsible not just for delivery excellence across projects, but for shaping how Parloa scales enterprise AI adoption. You define the operating model, elevate technical standards, build leadership capacity within the FDE org, and ensure that what we deploy repeatedly becomes productized.

FDE is where product meets enterprise reality. As Head of FDE, you ensure that reality strengthens the product rather than fragmenting it.

Areas of ownership:

• Regional FDE Strategy & Operating Model: Establish scalable delivery models (pods, vertical focus, specialization layers) and balance customization and productization to maximize impact and margin.
• Build and Develop a High-Performance Organization: Hire, coach, and develop Team Leads and senior FDEs as well as build leadership capacity within the organization (succession planning, career ladders, growth paths). Establish strong performance standards and accountability frameworks while ensuring a culture of ownership.
• Ensure Predictable, High-Quality Enterprise Delivery: Own delivery health across all strategic deployments by implementing scalable capacity planning, forecasting, and utilization management. 
• Standardize project governance: risk management, escalation paths, dependency tracking and define quality benchmarks for architecture, security, reliability, and maintainability.  Ensure strong production stability in enterprise environments.
• Drive Technical Excellence & Architectural Standards: Define architectural guardrails and reference patterns for enterprise deployments. Establish review mechanisms for high-impact technical decisions. Ensure repeatable integration patterns across enterprise systems (APIs, identity, data pipelines). Maintain deep technical credibility across cloud, backend, infra, and AI system design.
• Turn Field Learnings into Product Leverage: Identify recurring implementation patterns and push for productization. Partner closely with Product and Core Engineering to reduce one-offs implementations and provide educated input on roadmap prioritization using structured field data. Define criteria for what belongs in-product vs. what remains custom.
• Strengthen Customer & Executive Relationships: Serve as executive technical sponsor for key enterprise accounts. Build trust with CIOs, enterprise architects, and platform leaders. Support pre-sales for highly strategic opportunities. Represent FDE in executive customer escalations.

Our Technology Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, MongoDB

Who you are:

• Experience level: 10 to 15+ years in customer-facing software engineering, systems integration, DevOps, or data engineering roles with meaningful production responsibility.
• People leadership: 4+ years leading engineering delivery teams, ideally leaders-of-leaders (e.g., formal management, team lead responsibility, coaching, hiring, performance growth).
• Organizational leadership: Experience building and scaling engineering or forward-deployed/solutions teams.  Proven ability to design operating models and scale delivery capacity.  Strong h