Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Overview

Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem.

In this role, you’ll lead Stellar’s Solutions Engineering function, responsible for enabling transformative enterprise partners to successfully design, build, and operate production-grade integrations on the Stellar network.

This role owns Stellar’s Forward-deployed Solutions Engineering function end-to-end. You will be accountable for how SDF supports partners from early technical discovery and solution design through production launch and ongoing support, ensuring integrations are scalable, future-proof, and aligned with the long-term evolution of the Stellar ecosystem.

As a member of our team, you’ll operate at the intersection of engineering, architecture, and strategic partner engagement. This is a senior leadership role (L4+) that combines people management, architectural depth, and program ownership, and plays a critical role in enabling Stellar’s adoption by transformative enterprises.

• Own and continuously refine Stellar’s Solutions Engineering program, including engagement models, partner tiering, and escalation paths.

• Build, manage, mentor, and grow a team of Solutions Architects and Solutions Engineers, composed of both in-house team members and certified external collaborators.

• Lead end-to-end technical partner engagements, from early discovery and solution design through production launch and ongoing support.

• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for high-tiered partners, engaging directly when integrations require deeper architectural guidance or cross-functional coordination.

• Provide hands-on architectural leadership, including:

  • Guiding system and integration design for complex or non-standard use cases.

  • Reviewing proposed architectures and technical trade-offs.

  • Helping derisk integrations through design reviews, targeted prototyping, or technical deep dives.

• Set and uphold a high technical quality bar for enterprise integrations, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, maintainable, and future-proof.

• Collaborate closely with the Product and Engineering teams to surface recurring partner needs and tooling gaps, and inform roadmap prioritization based on real-world enterprise usage.

• Design and scale repeatable engagement models, including partner tiering, SLAs, documentation standards, and feedback loops that allow the program to scale without sacrificing quality.

• Oversee hiring, onboarding, training, and certification program for solutions engineers, both internally and across the Stellar partner ecosystem.

• Represent SDF in strategic partner conversations, deep technical reviews, and selective onsite engagements with enterprise partners.

• Continuously improve the Solutions Engineering program based on learnings from live integrations, postmortems, and evolving partner needs.

• Significant experience leading customer-facing engineering or solutions teams, ideally in blockchain, fintech, or financial infrastructure.

• A strong technical background that enables you to lead architectural discussions, evaluate system-level trade-offs, and guide complex integrations, even if you are not writing production code on a daily basis.

• Experience managing multi-disciplinary teams, such as Solutions Architects, Forward-Deployed Engineers, Partner Engineers, or similar roles.

• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-evolving environments, where you are expected to help define structure, process, and best practices.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate between partner needs, technical constraints, and internal engineering and product priorities.

• Experience working directly with enterprise or institutional partners, including senior technical stakeholders.

• Willingn…