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About the Role

Mesh is seeking an exceptional leader to build and scale the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, a new function within the company. This role involves leading a team of senior engineers who embed with strategic partners to ensure successful production integrations. The FDE function is positioned within Engineering, focusing on shipping code that integrates into partner environments and generalizes into the core platform, with time-boxed engagements and a clear milestone for delivering working solutions.

Responsibilities

Build and scale the FDE organization
Define the operating model: engagement shape, deployment cadence, scoping standards, and hiring bar
Hire at least 2-3 senior and staff-level generalists this year placed close to the partner engineering team and timezone they support
Be open to running the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team
Own delivery at our most strategic accounts
Be the person a partner's VP of Engineering or CTO calls — run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans
Assign named owners, not a rotating pool: one engineer or small pod per account, with a mapped executive sponsor
Own the qualification bar. FDE is justified when integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to the next ten partners
Set the boundary with Customer Success, who own the relationship, and Support, who own break-fix.
Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production — not tickets closed
Shape product and platform strategy
Turn the sharpest signal in the company — what partners need in production — into scoped, prioritized platform input
Enforce the productization ratchet: what's built either generalizes into our shared platform inside a defined window, or we stop re-investing in it.
Guard against both failure modes — a silent per-customer fork, and a core roadmap hijacked by one-off asks
Build reference architectures, QA, and monitoring that catch failure modes inside the integration rather than in a support queue

Requirements

10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
Experience building a 0→1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company
A track record of attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates
You came up as a strong backend or integrations engineer and can still read a codebase, whiteboard a system, debug a design, and review architecture alongside your team.
Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails.
A history of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production
Strong executive presence — effective and composed in front of partner executives and our own leadership team, including when an integration is on fire
Client-facing instincts: you like being in front of partners, can read a room, and can separate the stated ask from the real constraint
Willingness to push back. You've declined bad requests from partners and internal stakeholders alike, and driven alignment across engineering, revenue, and product without escalating every disagreement
Experience defining engagement models, scoping, and pricing for technical delivery work

Skills

Leadership
Team building
Technical judgment
Commercial acumen
Organizational leadership
Backend engineering
Integrations engineering
Broker integration patterns
Exchange integration patterns
Payments integration patterns
Crypto rails
Executive presence
Client-facing communication
Pushing back on requests
Driving alignment
Defining engagement models
Scoping technical delivery work
Pricing technical delivery work

Location

New York City area
San Francisco

Work Type

Full-time

Experience Level

4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
10+ years in technical roles

Salary/Compensations

$600,000-$900,000

About the Company

Mesh is looking for an exceptional leader to build and scale our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization — a new function at the company, starting with you.
Our partners aren't buying a static product off the shelf. They're buying working crypto rails inside their product, against their brokers, their compliance posture, and their release schedule.
Our thesis is simple: FDE sits inside Engineering, not in a services org.
Engagements are time-boxed with a clear "ship something working end-to-end" milestone — not open-ended residencies.
And the function stays deliberately small. The moment it needs a manager of managers, it has stopped being FDE and become consulting with an engineering badge. Holding that line is a core part of the job.