Founding Senior Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering

Join Afresh, a mission-driven company focused on eliminating food waste in grocery stores. As the Founding Senior Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will build and lead a team of engineers who integrate AI systems into enterprise grocery customers' data. You will own the technical relationship with each customer's engineering leaders and partner with the Deployment Strategist to plan and sequence the work. This is a player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership, where you will review architecture, unblock your engineers, and get into the code when needed. You will also own the architecture across accounts and partner with platform engineers to turn field learnings into product.

• Lead and build a team of forward deployed engineers to integrate AI systems into enterprise grocery customers' data.
• Own the technical relationship with each customer's engineering leaders, partnering with the Deployment Strategist to plan and sequence the work.
• Make resourcing calls that balance customer need, team development, and what the platform needs next, while ensuring high-quality execution across concurrent customer engagements.

• Executive presence, with the ability to move between a roadmap conversation with a customer's VP of Data and a debugging session with your own engineer
• Real data fluency. You can open an unfamiliar enterprise data model and tell within a day which parts are trustworthy, and you plan around dirty data rather than being surprised by it mid-deployment. Fluent in SQL and a modern cloud data platform such as Databricks, BigQuery or Snowflake
• Production AI and LLM experience across retrieval, tool use and agentic workflows, with the habit of measuring quality rather than eyeballing it
• 10+ years in software engineering, solutions architecture, consulting or a technical customer-facing role, including 2+ years managing engineers in a services, post-sales or forward deployed organization
• Architect's range across ingestion, data modeling, application and AI, with the judgment to see how the pieces fit and where the risk sits
• Experience delivering inside someone else's enterprise: their cloud, their security review, their change management, their politics
• We encourage all highly-qualified candidates to apply, even if they do not fulfill all the listed criteria
• Willingness to travel to customer sites roughly 25–40%
• Experience building a team from 0 to 1 rather than inheriting one: hiring, setting standards, and defining what good looks like
• A track record of working out how a business actually runs when none of it is written down: what it treats as real, how work moves through it, which rules are policy and which are one person's habit
• Having built a forward deployed, professional services or solutions engineering function from scratch
• Grocery, retail or supply chain data
• Knowledge graphs, ontologies or semantic layers running in production
• Delivering the same product both vendor-hosted and inside a customer's own cloud, and owning the abstraction between them