Forward Deployed Engineering Manager
Hybrid (San Francisco Bay Area)$190k - $250kfull-timePosted 4mo ago
About the role
Leader of the Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) team, responsible for the high-level technical design, staffing, coaching, and quality of customer data programs. Manages craft, growth, and deployment across domains and customers, while maintaining hands-on technical focus and serving as a player-coach.
Responsibilities
- Lead the FDE team end-to-end: hire, coach, manage performance, and develop careers across the FDE track and toward FDR or GM.
- Own the supply side of FDE staffing: commit FDEs to the staffing cadence and match them to projects by skill and development need, balancing vertical alignment with project needs.
- Set and uphold the craft bar: sharp task scoping, sound pipeline and measurement design (including LLM-as-judge and quality instrumentation), clear instruction writing, and customer-facing presentation of findings.
- Protect FDE focus: keep day-to-day project operations with SPLs and Pod Leads, focusing FDEs on scoping, depth, and customer data needs.
- Own FDE onboarding and certification: define eligible onboarding projects, maintain instruction and Loom repository, run onboarding exercises.
- Drive reuse and leverage: build templates, tooling, and playbooks to avoid rebuilding pipelines/instructions per project.
- Ensure FDEs work with FDRs on research and customer needs; partner with quality sign-off owners to catch quality in flight.
- Collaborate with SPL Manager, Deployment Leads, and GMs on staffing, delivery, and alignment with customer objectives.
- Step in on escalations for pipelines, delivery, or customer relationships.
- Maintain a live view of team capacity, utilization, and bench across active projects.
Qualifications
- Strong forward-deployed / FDE background, or significant experience managing technical or delivery people and hands-on, player-coach style leadership.
- Technical fluency in frontier-data work, RL environments, data pipelines, and quality/evaluation to credibly coach on scoping, pipelines, and data quality.
- Excellent judgment on data usefulness for customer goals and ability to translate ambiguous requirements into actionable plans.
- Track record of developing people and giving direct, useful feedback.
- High bar for quality with the ability to meet ambitious timelines.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-scaling environments where processes are still being built.
- Ability to manage multiple people and projects without losing attention to detail.
Skills
Required:Staffing and people managementTechnical coaching in frontier-data, RL environments, data pipelines
Benefits
- Labelbox emphasizes High-Impact Environment, Technical Excellence, Innovation at Speed, Continuous Growth, and Clear Ownership (implicit benefits within role description).
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Labelbox
The data factory for AI teams
Labelbox delivers the software and services to help you build, operate, or staff your data factory
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