Head of Customer Engineering (Forward Deployed Engineering)
Posted yesterday
The role in short
Lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team to embed with fintech and banking customers, owning technical onboarding, integration architecture, and production deployments for compliance workflows.
Location: San Jose
Employment Type: Full time
Location Type: On-site
Why this role exists
AiPrise is building the global compliance operating system for modern fintechs, marketplaces, banks, and platforms. We are trusted by leading financial institutions and process millions of onboarding decisions across KYC, KYB, AML, fraud, and monitoring.
We are past figuring out product market fit. We are now scaling complex, global customer deployments at speed.
Every customer we onboard is a high stakes, high complexity technical lift. Compliance teams are trusting us with their core regulatory workflows, and the integration work, configuration decisions, and workflow design that happen in the first weeks determine whether a customer thrives or churns. Time to first verification is our north star, and customer engineering is where that is won or lost.
We are looking for a Head of Customer Engineering to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team. This person sits at the intersection of the customer and the product team. They are the voice of the customer inside the company, and they make sure every customer is set up for success from day one.
This is a builder, a technical leader, and a customer champion in one role.
What you will own
1. The Forward Deployed Engineering team
- Lead, grow, and level up our team of FDEs deployed across our customer base
- Set the bar for what great forward deployed work looks like: deep product knowledge, strong engineering judgment, and genuine ownership of customer outcomes
- Define how FDEs are staffed against customers by tier, complexity, and region
- Build hiring loops, onboarding programs, and career paths that turn strong engineers into exceptional customer-facing ones
2. Customer onboarding and integrations
- Own time to first verification as a primary company metric
- Design and run the end to end technical onboarding journey from contract signed to live in production
- Lead FDEs through integration architecture, workflow configuration, sandbox validation, and go-live for both technical and non technical customers
- Create clean handoff rituals from sales to customer engineering to support
- Ship onboarding and integration playbooks that scale across SMB, mid market, and enterprise
3. Voice of the customer
- Be the strongest advocate for the customer inside the company
- Build a structured, high signal feedback loop from the field into product and engineering: what customers are asking for, where they struggle, and what would make them expand
- Translate messy customer signal into crisp product requirements, prioritized and backed by evidence
- Partner with product on roadmap decisions, bringing real deployment data and customer context to every debate
- Close the loop back to customers when their feedback ships
4. Customer success through engineering
- Ensure every customer is set up for success: correct integration patterns, sound workflow design, and configurations that will scale with their volume
- Own technical escalations end to end, from triage through resolution and postmortem
- Partner with engineering on customer impacting incidents and drive fixes with urgency
- Use AI aggressively across the team: agents that triage tickets, investigate issues, and accelerate integrations
- Build the self serve layer, documentation, and tooling that lets customers move fast without waiting on us
5. Founder level partnership
- Act as a thought partner to the founders on customer strategy, deployment models, and scale
- Join key customer calls, POCs, enterprise escalations, and critical incidents
- Influence tooling, staffing models, and service tier definitions
- Represent customer engineering credibly with customers, partners, and investors
What success looks like in 12 to 18 months
- Median time to first verification is cut by at least half
- Every strategic customer has a clear technical owner and a documented path to success
- Product and engineering treat customer engineering as their most trusted signal on what to build next
- Customers name their FDE relationship as a reason they stay and expand
- Technical escalations resolve faster quarter over quarter, with fewer repeats
- The team ships with strong ownership and clarity without founder involvement in daily deployments
Who you are
We are looking for someone who is opinionated, technically sharp, and relentlessly customer driven.
You likely have:
- 10 plus years in solutions engineering, forward deployed engineering, sales engineering, or technical customer-facing leadership
- Experience scaling a customer-facing engineering function at a Series A to Series C B2B SaaS, infrastructure, or fintech company
- A track record building an FDE, solutions, or implementation function from scratch
- Deep comfort with APIs, integrations, and enterprise technical sales cycles. You can read code, debug an integration, and whiteboard an architecture with a customer's engineering team
- Experience translating customer needs into product direction and holding your ground in roadmap debates
- Comfort operating with ambiguity, speed, and high ownership
- A strong bias toward action over decks
Bonus:
- Compliance, KYB, KYC, fraud, payments, or regtech background
- Experience across global customer bases including LATAM, Africa, SEA, and MENA
- You have deployed AI tooling in a customer-facing engineering org and have strong opinions on where it works
- Experience running POCs and technical evaluations against competitors
- Familiarity with tooling such as Pylon, Linear, Intercom, or Zendesk
You are:
- Able to go from messy customer signal to product requirement to shipped outcome
- Comfortable saying no to a customer and explaining why, and equally comfortable pushing product to say yes
- Respected by engineers because you are one
- Energized by hard problems and real world impact
- Excited to build in a fast moving, founder led environment
Why AiPrise
- Category defining problem in global trust and compliance
- Real scale with millions of checks and global coverage
- AI native from the ground up
- Strong revenue growth and enterprise traction
- Founders who are deeply product and engineering driven
- Massive whitespace ahead
Prep for this interview
4 questions likely to come up at AiPrise, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Deep comfort with APIs, integrations, and enterprise technical sales cycles. You can read code, debug an integration, and whiteboard an architecture with a customer's engineering team”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 2Ownership and working with customers
They wrote: “Comfort operating with ambiguity, speed, and high ownership”
Tell me about a project where the requirements kept changing. What did you do?
How to answer
Why they ask: Ambiguity is the norm. They want proof you can keep moving without a clear spec.
- The project and why requirements kept moving
- What you did to pin them down (short demos, written decisions)
- The trade-offs you made to keep shipping
- The result, with a number if you have one
Tip: Show how you reduced the change, beyond how you coped with it.
- 3Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Translate messy customer signal into crisp product requirements, prioritized and backed by evidence”
How do you decide what to build first when a customer wants ten things?
How to answer
Why they ask: FDEs have limited weeks per customer. This tests judgment about value, effort and risk.
- Score each request by business value and by effort, with the customer in the room
- Pick one item that proves value fast and unblocks later work
- Write down what's out of scope so it doesn't creep back in
- Revisit the list after the first release, with real usage data
Tip: Show a simple way to rank the list and name what you'd leave out on purpose.
- 4Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Compliance, KYB, KYC, fraud, payments, or regtech background”
The customer's security team sends a 200-question review. How do you handle it?
How to answer
Why they ask: Security reviews often block deals. FDEs help get through them.
- Start from your company's standard answers (SOC 2 report, past reviews)
- Answer clearly; don't oversell
- Bring in your security team for anything you're unsure of
- Keep the new answers for the next customer
Tip: Reuse past answers, flag honest gaps, and offer a call for the hard questions.
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