Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Head Of Forward Deployed Engineering

New York, NY

At Mesh, our mission is to enable consumers to pay and be paid with any asset. Today, trillions of dollars in tokenized assets exist but remain largely unusable for everyday commerce. Mesh is bridging this gap by making crypto payments reliable, useful, and ubiquitous. We combine a powerful orchestration engine with a seamless consumer app to unlock liquidity for the world.

Backed by leading investors like Pay Pal Ventures, Paradigm, and Galaxy Ventures, we are building the infrastructure for the next era of the global economy. Join us!

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. We have a strong preference for someone who resides in the New York City area or San Francisco.

Reporting to our CTO, you'll lead a team of senior engineers who embed directly with a small, capped set of our most strategic partners — exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets that drive the lion's share of our volume. These 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.

The gap between a demo that works and a production integration that survives contact with a partner's environment is where deals stall, and where generic support queues and quarterly roadmap cycles fail.

Our thesis is simple: FDE sits inside Engineering, not in a services org. An FDE ships code that lands in the account and when it generalizes in our core platform. 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.

This role requires equal parts technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership. You need to be technical enough to earn immediate credibility with a partner's top engineers, scope an integration live on a call, and call out a bad architectural decision — but your leverage comes from the team you build and the alignment you drive, not from the code you personally write.

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. CS flags what an account needs; you decide whether it's an FDE build, a platform ask, or neither
• 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

Leadership and team building

• 10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
• Experience building a…