Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Mesh is looking for an exceptional leader to build and scale the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, a new function at the company starting with you. Reporting to the CTO, you'll lead a team of senior engineers who embed directly with strategic partners—exchanges, neobanks, and prediction markets—to ship working crypto rails inside their products. FDE sits inside Engineering, not in a services organization: you ship code that lands in production and generalizes into the core platform, with time-boxed engagements and a deliberately small, high-leverage team. This role requires equal parts technical judgment, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership.

What you'll do

• Define the FDE 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 teams and timezones they support
• Run the first engagement(s) yourself to prove the playbook, then scale it through the team
• Be the executive point of contact for strategic partner accounts—run integration reviews, hold commitments, and turn stalled technical conversations into signed plans
• Assign named owners to accounts: one engineer or small pod per account with a mapped executive sponsor, not a rotating pool
• Own the qualification bar for which accounts warrant FDE investment based on whether integration is the bottleneck, the account can absorb a dedicated engineer, speed decides the deal, or the pattern generalizes to future partners
• Set boundaries with Customer Success and Support, deciding whether account needs are FDE builds, platform asks, or neither
• Measure partner growth, volume, and time-to-production rather than tickets closed
• Turn signal from partners' production needs into scoped, prioritized platform input
• Enforce the productization ratchet: work built either generalizes into the shared platform within a defined window, or investment stops
• Build reference architectures, QA, and monitoring that catch failure modes inside integrations rather than in support queues

What you bring

• 10+ years in technical roles, with 4+ years leading forward-deployed teams
• Experience building a 0 to 1 organization or a new service line inside an existing company
• A proven track record attracting, developing, and retaining senior engineers in a competitive market, including personally closing candidates
• Background as a strong backend or integrations engineer; you can read a codebase, whiteboard a system, debug a design, and review architecture alongside your team (day-to-day coding not required)
• Substantial experience with broker, exchange, or payments integration patterns and crypto rails
• A history of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical work in production
• Strong executive presence—effective and composed in front of partner executives and leadership, including when an integration is on fire
• Client-facing instincts: you enjoy being in front of partners, read rooms well, and separate stated asks from real constraints
• Willingness to push back on bad requests from partners and internal stakeholders, driving alignment across engineering, revenue, and product without escalating every disagreement
• Experience defining engagement models, scoping, and pricing for technical delivery work

What we offer

• Annual base salary of $282,000 to $355,000 in New York or San Francisco (adjusted for other locations)
• Equity
• Comprehensive health coverage for you and your family
• Unlimited PTO
• Dedicated budget for courses, conferences, and certifications
• Hybrid work: at least 40% in-office (approximately two days per week) at San Francisco, New York, or Bangalore hubs
• Top-tier tools and equipment

About Mesh

Mesh enables consumers to pay and be paid with any asset, bridging the gap between tokenized assets and everyday commerce. The company combines a powerful orchestration engine with a seamless consumer app to unlock liquidity globally. Backed by PayPal Ventures, Paradigm, and Galaxy Ventures, Mesh is building infrastructure for the next era of the global economy.