Founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

About Invoca

Invoca is the revenue execution and platform leader that helps marketing, commerce, and contact center teams turn every conversation into revenue. Through its AI agents, Invoca engages, qualifies, and converts customers across SMS and voice, orchestrating seamless buyer journeys and measurable, profitable growth. With over 300 employees, 2,000+ customers, and $100M in revenue, the company continues to lead the category it created.

Invoca's AI vision centers on using trustworthy, first-party data to deliver intelligent, authentic, and empathetic AI — connecting digital and human experiences to build lasting customer relationships. Invoca has raised $184M from leading investors, including Upfront Ventures, Accel, Silver Lake Waterman, H.I.G. Growth Partners, and Salesforce Ventures.

The Forward Deployed Engineering team sits at the intersection of R&D and Go To Market — deployed against the deals and accounts where technical depth changes the outcome. FDEs sit inside the customer's world to ensure the customer gets maximum value from Invoca’s agentic AI products. Leading the technical evaluation, the FDE’s job is to absorb the complexity of building on Invoca's platform and hand the customer something simple that just works, instead of listing a set of decisions the customer has to make themselves.

We're looking for a Founding Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering) to build and lead the team of engineers embedded in our Go-to-Market motion. You'll own the function that turns technical credibility into closed deals and successful onboardings — hiring and coaching FDEs, prioritizing which deals and accounts get engineering muscle, and being the escalation point when a deal or implementation needs more than an individual contributor can carry alone.

This is a player-coach role early on and a full people-management role as the team scales. You'll be judged as much on pipeline influence and customer outcomes as on team health and growth.

• Hire, coach, and manage a team of Forward Deployed Engineers; set the bar for what "great" looks like in a customer-facing technical role
• Triage and prioritize FDE deployment across the deal pipeline — deciding which opportunities and accounts warrant dedicated technical support, and when
• Act as the senior technical escalation point on strategic or at-risk deals and implementations, stepping in personally when the stakes are highest
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success leadership to define where FDEs plug into the sales and onboarding motion, and where the handoffs are
• Build the operating rhythm for the team: how PoCs get scoped, how wins and losses get debriefed, how reusable assets get captured and shared instead of rebuilt every time
• Own the feedback loop from field to product — aggregate what your team is hearing across dozens of deals into a small number of sharp, prioritized asks for product and engineering leadership
• Report on team impact in terms the business cares about: deals influenced, time-to-value for new customers, win rates on technically contested deals
• Manage headcount planning and capacity — knowing when the team needs to grow, and where geographically or by specialization

• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role — you've done the job you're now managing
• People management experience, or clear evidence of leadership in a technical, customer-facing capacity (leading projects, mentoring, informal team leadership)
• Strong business judgment — you can tell the difference between a deal worth throwing engineering time at and one that isn't, often with…