Engineering Manager - Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Engineering Manager – Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Location: Bangalore

Experience: 8–12 Years

Important Note

This role is not for managers who have moved away from technology. We expect our FDE Managers to remain deeply technical and capable of designing, building, debugging, and reviewing systems alongside their teams.

The strongest candidates for this role are equally comfortable:

Leading engineers

Designing architectures

Debugging production issues

Reviewing code

Working directly with customers

Driving execution in ambiguous environments

About Blue Machines

Blue Machines is building AI Employees. We help enterprises deploy AI agents across customer support, sales, operations, research, collections, recruitment, and other business functions. Our agents operate across voice, chat, email, CRM systems, internal tools, and enterprise workflows.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team.

About The Role

Forward Deployed Engineering sits at the intersection of Engineering, Product, AI, and Customer Success. Unlike traditional engineering teams that primarily build platform capabilities, the FDE team works directly with enterprise customers to understand business problems, design solutions, build custom workflows, deploy AI agents, and drive measurable business outcomes. You will lead a team responsible for taking customers from: "We want to automate this workflow" to "The AI employee is live, measurable, and delivering business value."

This is a highly hands-on leadership role. You will be expected to switch seamlessly between:

Customer discussions

Solution architecture

Engineering reviews

Production debugging

Delivery planning

Team leadership

No two customer deployments look the same. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, adaptability, and ownership.

What You'll Do

Lead the Forward Deployed Engineering Team

Manage and mentor a team of Forward Deployed Engineers.

Establish a high-performance engineering culture.

Drive execution across multiple customer deployments.

Help engineers navigate ambiguity and technical complexity.

Participate in hiring and team building.

Create an environment of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Own Customer Success Through Engineering

Work directly with enterprise customers to:

Understand business workflows.

Identify automation opportunities.

Translate requirements into technical solutions.

Design AI-powered workflows.

Lead customer deployments from design to production.

Ensure successful adoption and measurable outcomes.

You will regularly engage with:

CTOs

Engineering leaders

Product leaders

Operations teams

Customer support organizations

Business stakeholders

Architect AI Solutions

Design and review solutions involving:

Voice AI

Agent orchestration

Workflow automation

Enterprise integrations

Knowledge retrieval systems

CRM integrations

Telephony platforms

Customer support systems

You should be comfortable moving from business requirements to technical architecture with minimal guidance. Remain Deeply Hands-On. This is not a purely managerial position.

You should be capable of:

Reviewing production code.

Conducting architecture reviews.

Debugging production incidents.

Building prototypes.

Helping engineers solve complex technical problems.

Evaluating engineering tradeoffs.

Identifying reliability and scalability risks.

While you may not write production code every day, you should be capable of personally building and debugging systems when required.

Drive Execution

Balance customer commitments with engineering capacity.

Prioritize effectively across multiple deployments.

Identify delivery risks early.

Manage scope and stakeholder expectations.

Ensure predictable execution and delivery quality.

Improve Operational Excellence

Lead production incident reviews.

Improve observability and debugging practices.

Drive reliability improvements.

Establish strong engineering operational processes.

Create feedback loops that improve delivery quality over time.

What Success Looks Like

Within 3 Months

Build strong relationships with customers and engineering teams.

Understand the Blue Machines platform and deployment patterns.

Contribute meaningfully to customer solution design.

Establish credibility as a technical leader.

Within 6 Months

Successfully lead multiple customer deployments.

Improve engineering quality and delivery predictability.

Help scale FDE processes and practices.

Mentor engineers through complex customer implementations.

Within 12 Months

Become a trusted leader for customers and internal teams.

Scale the FDE organization while maintaining engineering quality.

Drive strategic customer deployments.

Help define how AI Employees are deployed across industries.

What We're Looking For

Required

8+ years of software engineering experience.

2+ years of engineering management or technical leadership experience.

Strong hands-on engineering background.

Experience designing and operating production systems.

Strong system design and architecture skills.

Strong debugging and troubleshooting capability.

Experience leading engineers through complex technical projects.

Excellent communication skills.

Strongly Preferred

Experience in one or more of:

AI Agents

LLM Applications

Voice AI

Conversational AI

Contact Center Technologies

Workflow Automation

Enterprise SaaS Platforms

Customer-Facing Engineering

Solutions Engineering

Distributed Systems

Traits We Value

We value leaders who:

Take ownership.

Think from first principles.

Move quickly while maintaining quality.

Stay calm during production incidents.

Communicate clearly.

Make pragmatic decisions.

Build trust with customers and engineers.

Thrive in ambiguity.

Most importantly, we value leaders who can move seamlessly between customer conversations, architecture reviews, debugging sessions, engineering execution, and team leadership.

Interview Process

Our process is designed to evaluate real-world engineering leadership capability.

Stage 1: Take Home Assignment

Build a Voice AI Banking Customer Support Agent.

We evaluate:

Engineering quality

Architecture

Product thinking

Documentation

Ownership

Round 1: Assignment Deep Dive & Technical Review

Discussion of:

Architecture decisions

Implementation choices

Tradeoffs

Scalability

Product decisions

Round 2: Production Debugging & Incident Management

Realistic production scenarios involving:

Logs

Metrics

Reliability issues

Customer escalations

Incident response

Round 3: Engineering Leadership & Execution

Scenarios covering:

Prioritization

Capacity planning

Customer commitments

Team leadership

Technical decision making

Why Join Blue Machines

Work at the frontier of AI and Voice AI.

Solve meaningful business problems using AI Employees.

Work directly with enterprise customers.

Lead high-impact deployments.

Influence architecture, product direction, and engineering culture.

Help define the future of AI-powered work.

If you enjoy solving hard problems, building AI systems, leading engineers, and working closely with customers, we'd love to hear from you.