Lead Engineer ( Forward Deployed Engineer ) Santa Clara, CA

Lead Engineer

Eightfold is a global leader in AI-native enterprise talent platform, trusted by the world's largest and most respected fortune 500 organizations. Our platform is built from the ground up operating at scale across Azure and AWS, deployed in multiple regions globally, including IL4-compliant environments for US Government, supporting users in 100+ countries and 30+ languages. Today, Eightfold is at the forefront of agentic AI, delivering intelligent agents that actively drive outcomes across hiring and talent workflows, while much of the industry is still experimenting with prototypes.

At Eightfold, we are defining the next era of agentic talent systems. What sets Eightfold apart is not just the technology & our mission, but the team behind it. We are a deeply technical, execution-driven organization that values ownership, collaboration, and high standards. Our engineers, product leaders, and go-to-market teams work closely together — in person and across functions — to build systems that scale in the real world.

If you're excited to work on hard problems, move with urgency, raise the bar every day, and help build agentic systems that transform how the world works, Eightfold is the place to do it.

Customer-Driven Product & Platform Development

• Design and build customer-facing enhancements, integrations, and custom workflows that scale across the platform.
• Translate enterprise customer requirements into durable, reusable platform capabilities.
• Influence product and engineering roadmaps by identifying patterns across customer needs.
• Balance short-term customer demands with long-term platform health and architectural integrity.

Technical Leadership & Ownership

• Own end-to-end design and implementation of complex, cross-cutting features spanning multiple services or product areas.
• Drive architectural decisions focused on reliability, performance, extensibility, and maintainability.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Platform Engineering, and Applied AI teams to deliver solutions aligned with customer outcomes.

Enterprise Customer Engineering & Escalations

• Act as the primary technical escalation point for the most critical enterprise customer issues across all Eightfold products.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues involving distributed systems, large-scale data, and integrations.
• Work directly with Customer Success, Solutions Engineering, and Support teams to deliver timely, high-quality resolutions.
• Lead root cause analysis and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Deep engagement with customer issues, the focus of this role will be on engineering durable solutions, improving platform capabilities, and eliminating entire classes of problems.

Mentorship & Engineering Excellence

• Mentor and guide junior and mid-level engineers, especially within customer engineering and escalation workflows.
• Lead design reviews and code reviews with an emphasis on scalability and operational readiness.
• Establish best practices for observability, debugging, testing, and incident response in customer-facing systems.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems at scale.
• Strong backend engineering experience (e.g., Java, Python, Scala, or similar) with distributed systems.
• Proven experience handling enterprise customer escalations and complex production issues.
• Deep understanding of system design, APIs, data pipelines, and service-oriented or microservices architectures.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments with competing customer and platform priorities.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Hands-on experience building frontend applications with React, Angular, and related UI frameworks
• Strong communication skills.

Please note this role is categorized as onsite or hybrid in Santa Clara, CA. The base salary ranges below are provided for pay transparency. Base pay is only one piece of our total compensation package as this role is eligible for bonus and equity awards. Compensation varies depending on a number of factors including qualifications, skills, competencies, experience and zones which are determined by location.

Zone A is SF Bay Area, CA. Zone A base annual salary range:

+ discretionary annual bonus up to 15% + pre-IPO equity (stock options).