Forward Deployed Engineering Team
Posted 28 Jul 2026
Advertised as “Forward Deployed Engineering Team Lead”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
No salary listed for this role.
Your Impact
Procurement is over 50% of revenue for industrial companies and their biggest lever for profitability. The hard part is not the software, it is that every single customer's reality is different: a different ERP, a different data model, decades of undocumented process. Generic platforms stall exactly there, and that gap is where most enterprise AI value quietly dies.
Forward Deployed Engineering is how we close it: engineers who sit inside the customer's environment, build in their data, and turn what they learn into product. This function does not exist at Tacto yet. You will build the motion from the start, collaborating with Product, and discover what Forward Deployed Engineering means for Tacto, figuring out how much value we can generate for leading industrials.
Your Tasks
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Build the function. Charter, operating model, quality bar, metrics. Bring this function to the next level.
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Hire the right talent. The team is there to grow. Hire exceptional Forward Deployed Engineers and build your own high performing team.
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Own how we engage customers. Design and establish the processes for how engineers scope, embed, build, and hand over. This is the core of the role, not an afterthought to the technical work.
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Build, hands-on, in customer environments. Agents, pipelines, custom logic on top of our platform, in real production data. You lead by shipping.
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Turn one-offs into product. Work directly with Product and Engineering to convert what you build at the edge into platform capability. An FDE org that productises nothing is just an expensive consultancy, and you will make sure we never become one.
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Lead the first FDEs. Find the rare people who are excellent engineers and credible in front of a Head of IT. Set the standard by being it.
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Own the hardest customer rooms. Lead escalations with Heads of Procurement and IT and be the senior presence customers trust.
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Be AI-native. Use AI to change what the function is capable of, then measure it, then build it into how the team works.
Your Profile
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5+ years building software close to customers: forward deployed or deployment-style engineering, technical program leadership in a product company, or an engineering-heavy path through top-tier consulting at Manager level or above.
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You write code and you want to keep writing it. Python and SQL at working level, comfortable with data pipelines and integration architecture.