Manager - Forward Deployed Engineer

Manager, Forward Deployed Engineers

Run the Technical Integration Ecosystem of a Series B Company. Strategy to Execution.

About Spyne

Spyne is building the AI operating system for automotive retail. Starting with visual merchandising and expanding into conversational AI, Spyne helps dealers move inventory faster, respond to buyers instantly, and run more of the dealership stack with AI.

Why This Role Exists

Forward Deployment Engineers are Vini's technical specialists — the people who get under the hood of the product to configure conversation flows, tune AI behaviour, write minor custom logic, and ensure each dealer's Vini instance works exactly as intended.

What You’ll Build

• A tiered FDE service model: which dealer requests are standard config, which require custom logic, and which need product-level input — with clear escalation paths for each.
• A configuration QA process: every custom workflow gets tested against real conversation scenarios before going live with a dealer.
• An AI quality review programme — FDEs regularly audit live conversations for tone, accuracy, escalation behaviour, and brand compliance.
• A configuration knowledge base: documented patterns, reusable templates, and common customisation recipes that reduce per-dealer effort over time.
• A technical discovery framework used at the start of every complex dealer engagement to surface requirements, constraints, and risks early.

Key Responsibilities

Hiring, developing, and setting the bar

• Build and lead the FDE team from the ground up: hire engineers who have the rare mix of technical depth and customer-facing judgment that this role demands.
• Define what great looks like for an FDE at Spyne - the deployment standards, quality thresholds, and customer interaction expectations - and hold the team to them.
• Write the FDE playbook: onboarding process, configuration templates, escalation protocols, and the tribal knowledge that currently lives in individual heads.
• Run weekly deployment reviews. Know the status of every live dealer in the team's portfolio - what's working, what's stalling, and where you need to step in.
• Develop FDEs from reactive troubleshooters into engineers who anticipate failure, improve product, and grow accounts without being asked.

Personally owning the hardest deployments

• Own the most complex dealer accounts yourself: enterprise groups, multi-rooftop deployments, integrations with non-standard DMS or telephony stacks, and accounts where a previous deployment has failed.
• Join strategic sales calls and demos as the technical authority for Vini - the person who answers the questions an AE cannot and who makes a sceptical GM trust the product before they sign.
• Personally lead go-lives for high-stakes accounts. When a dealer insists on a person on-site, you are that person.
• Handle critical escalations: a live deployment that breaks, a conversation quality collapse, an integration that stops syncing. You diagnose, fix, and debrief.

Managing the product feedback loop

• Own the formal channel between field reality and Product. Every pattern your team sees across deployments - config gaps, recurring failures, features dealers keep requesting - gets translated into well-scoped engineering input.
• Sit in product prioritisation and push for fixes that unblock deployment or improve conversation quality. You are not a passive reporter - advocate for your dealers.
• Define and track the metrics that prove Vini is working: time-to-autopilot, answer rate, booking conversion, conversation quality scores. Use them to drive product decisions, not just report them.
• Build the internal knowledge base that lets the team share what they learn - prompt patterns that work, integration quirks by DMS vendors, dealer-type-specific configuration approaches.

Managing deployment quality across the entire team's portfolio

• Set the QA standard for every deployment: no dealer goes to autopilot without passing the call quality review your team defines.
• Monitor live deployments proactively. Catch performance drops before the dealer does.
• Expand accounts - move dealers from one workflow to three, from one rooftop to a group - by proving Vini handles the calls they were nervous about.

What we’re looking for

Must-haves

• 6+ years as an FDE, solutions engineer, implementation engineer, or technical account manager - with meaningful time in front of customers. You have shipped technical deployments and sat across from a frustrated customer and fixed their problem live.
• You have led or mentored a small technical team - and you know the difference between being the best individual contributor in the room and being the person who makes everyone around them better.
• Deep comfort with voice AI or conversational AI specifically: prompt engineering, intent design, call flow logic, latency and interruption handling, transfer behaviour. You know where these systems fail and why.
• Fluency with APIs, CRM/DMS integrations, telephony systems, and log-reading. You debug without waiting for the engineering team and you file issues engineers want to pick up.
• Product sense sharp enough to look at a week of dealer complaints and separate config problems from training problems from real product gaps - and write the latter up in a way that gets prioritised.
• The range to talk to a dealership GM and a Spyne backend engineer in the same hour and be trusted by both.
• Willingness to work US-overlapping hours and travel to the US regularly - sometimes for a week at a time during a go-live or a critical dealer escalation.
• A bias toward outcome ownership. When a deployment stalls under your team, you do not reassign it. You find out why and you fix it.

Nice to have

• Hands-on prompt engineering experience with LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, or similar).
• Automotive, dealer tech, or field service background.
• Experience with agentic AI workflows — tool use, multi-step reasoning, handoffs.
• Familiarity with conversation analytics and quality scoring methodologies.

What We Offer

• Ownership A new business to build from scratch - not a department to manage. Yours to define, prove, and scale.
• Autonomy Full freedom to operate like a founder, backed by Spyne’s platform, customers, and capital.
• Equity Meaningful equity reflecting a founding business leader role, structured for long-term wealth creation.
• Trajectory Clear path from EIR to Business Head with full P&L ownership as the business scales.