Hire a Senior or Staff FDE
For the accounts you can't afford to lose. We find senior FDEs who have led deployments end to end and can be trusted alone with your hardest customer.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Senior or Staff FDE does day to day
Be the technical owner the customer's leadership trusts with the whole rollout.
Shape the architecture across your product and the customer's stack.
Mentor newer FDEs and step in when a deployment goes sideways.
Turn what keeps coming up in the field into roadmap decisions.
Why hire your Senior or Staff FDE through us
Tested on the work and the customer
Every candidate passes a skills test for this role and a live role-play built around your own customer before they reach your interviews.
Run by a working FDE
Asher Cohen works as a Forward Deployed Engineer and is on every search. He knows which interview answers hold up once someone is on site with a real customer.
A short list with scorecards
You get a small set of candidates, each with a written scorecard from our tests. If we don't think someone would hold up in front of your customer, we don't send them.
Signs you need one
- Your largest customer needs a single, senior technical owner.
- Your first FDEs are stretched and need someone to learn from.
- Deployments keep hitting the same architectural walls.
- Your founders are still the escalation path for every big account.
What great looks like
- Has taken a deployment from signed contract to production more than once.
- Stays calm in a room full of the customer's VPs.
- Knows when to build something custom and when to send the request back to product.
- Makes the FDEs around them better.
Running the interviews yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the interview questions we use on every candidate. You're welcome to use them in your own process.
Sample job description
A first draft to paste into your applicant tracking system and edit to fit your team.
About the role. You'll own the technical relationship with our most important customers, from first scoping session to production and expansion.
You'll lead complex deployments, design solutions across our platform and customer systems and mentor the FDE team.
You have [6+] years of engineering experience, including [2+] years leading customer-facing technical work.
Questions about hiring a Senior or Staff FDE
Anything we haven't covered? Start a search and ask us on the first call, or email us at hello@embedhire.com.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Senior FDE or Head of FDE?
If you need someone to own your biggest accounts, hire a senior FDE. If you need someone to hire, manage and design the team, hire a Head of FDE. If you need both right now, start with the senior FDE. A strong one can grow into the Head role.
Do senior searches take longer?
They can. There are fewer senior FDEs, most of them aren't looking, and the good ones want to know who they'd report to and how much room they'd have before they take a call. We approach them directly and have that conversation for you. If your requirements narrow the pool a lot, we'll tell you at the start of the search.
Do senior FDEs still write code?
The good ones write code every week. A senior FDE who has stopped coding is really an account manager with a technical title. Senior candidates take the same technical screen as everyone else, scored to a higher bar, so you'll know which kind you're meeting.
How long does it take to hire a Senior or Staff FDE?
Your first vetted shortlist arrives in under 5 days from kickoff. Everyone on it has passed our skills test and a role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. What usually decides the timeline is how quickly your team can run final interviews, so we take care of the scheduling to keep the search moving.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
We run two tests before you meet anyone. The first is a skills test for this role. For engineering roles that's a technical screen where they write working code against a messy API, and for strategists it's a business case. The second is a live role-play built around your own customer, which we design with you when we scope the role. You get a written scorecard for every candidate, and your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. You can meet everyone on your shortlist without committing to anything. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire comes with our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate does well on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if that means going back out to search. Any concerns we have go on the scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait an extra week than hire the wrong person.
What if the hire doesn't work out?
If your hire leaves or isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find you a replacement. We run the search again using what we learned the first time, and every new candidate goes through the same tests.
See your first Senior or Staff FDE candidates in under 5 days
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.