Role Description
Senior Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) sit at the intersection of enterprise customer environments and a fast-moving internal product. They partner directly with customers to design, build, troubleshoot, and improve production solutions, and they are ultimately accountable for helping customers get to production.
This role is best suited for engineers who want to own technical outcomes end to end: understanding what a customer is trying to build, shipping the integration, and feeding learnings back into the product roadmap.
We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in Tysons, VA for our hybrid working model.
Responsibilities
Customer success
- Serve as the primary technical owner for customer engagements from initial discovery through production rollout
- Understand each customer's architecture, constraints, and definition of success, and drive toward that outcome
- Manage expectations, communicate risks clearly, and help customers navigate technical decisions with confidence
Technical integration
- Build the connectors, pipelines, and supporting tooling needed to make the platform work inside real enterprise environments
- Write production-quality code, troubleshoot issues, and implement fixes directly in active workstreams
- Work effectively within customer environments that have different stacks, infrastructure, and integration constraints
Product feedback loop
- Capture product feedback with precision, including logs, reproduction steps, and a clear proposed path forward
- Use customer engagements to identify product gaps, surface recurring patterns, and help improve the product roadmap
- Document technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly so product and engineering teams can extend the work
Workstream collaboration
- Partner closely with product and engineering teams to help turn field patterns into reusable product capabilities
- Contribute directly in focused workstreams by helping drive technical design, implementation, and delivery
- Make sound engineering decisions under pressure while building and iterating quickly
Engagement management
- Coordinate independently across internal teams and customer stakeholders to keep delivery moving
- Communicate clearly across technical, business, and executive audiences
Qualifications
Basic qualifications
- 5 - 8 years of engineering experience required
- Hands-on production engineering experience, including writing code, debugging failures, and implementing fixes directly
- Engineering experience in AI and agentic development
- Experience with developing and deploying software within enterprise environments
- Experience shipping production solutions at scale that customers relied on
- Experience building integrations across existing systems and infrastructure
- Strong troubleshooting and code review skills, including the ability to identify root causes and drive resolution
- Willingness and ability to travel up to 30% to customer sites as needed for on-site engagements, technical reviews, and presentations
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, or deploying AI systems in production
- Prior experience in an FDE or similar forward-deployed engineering role
About MongoDB
MongoDB is built for change, empowering our customers and our people to innovate at the speed of the market. We have redefined the data platform for the AI era, enabling builders to create, transform, and disrupt industries with software. MongoDB's unified data platform, the most widely available, globally distributed data platform on the market, helps organizations modernize legacy workloads, embrace innovation, and unleash AI. Our cloud-native platform, MongoDB Atlas, is the only globally distributed, multi-cloud data platform and is available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
With offices worldwide and over 67,000 customers, including 75% of the Fortune 100 and AI-native startups, relying on MongoDB for their most important applications, we're powering the next era of software.
Our compass at MongoDB is our Leadership Commitment, guiding how and why we make decisions, show up for each other, and win. It's what makes us MongoDB.
To drive the personal growth and business impact of our employees, we're committed to developing a supportive and enriching culture for everyone. From employee affinity groups, to fertility assistance and a generous parental leave policy, we value our employees' wellbeing and want to support them along every step of their professional and personal journeys. Learn more about what it's like to work at MongoDB, and help us make an impact on the world!
MongoDB is committed to providing any necessary accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter.
MongoDB, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and makes all hiring decisions without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Req ID: 2273506591
About Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.
Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.
Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.
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