Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

Lead Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) are the most senior technical leaders in the FDE organization. They own the overall technical strategy for the FDE domain, not just individual engagements, and are accountable for how the entire function operates, scales, and improves over time. They set direction across multiple concurrent engagements, teams, and quarters, and are the technical voice the organization relies on when stakes, ambiguity, or cross-functional complexity are highest. This role sits at the intersection of technical depth, organizational strategy, and people leadership, setting the technical bar for the function, shaping how Product and Engineering prioritize based on field reality, and developing the next generation of Staff-level FDEs. We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in New York City for our hybrid working model. Responsibilities Own the FDE organization's overall engagement strategy, serving as the primary technical escalation point across the portfolio for the highest-risk, highest-visibility, and most ambiguous situations Act as the trusted technical counterpart to customer executives and internal VP/executive stakeholders on strategic bets, major risks, and cross-portfolio tradeoffs Set the technical architecture standards and design principles that govern how the FDE domain builds customer-facing solutions and platform capabilities, turning organization-level ambiguity into coherent multi-quarter technical strategy Stay hands-on where it matters most, writing and reviewing code and personally unblocking the hardest technical failures to keep the organization's technical bar grounded in reality Own the translation of field-wide patterns into the FDE domain's long-term technical vision, representing that vision to Product and Engineering executive leadership and defending multi-quarter roadmap tradeoffs Own the technical growth and career development of FDEs through mentorship, coaching, and calibration of the org's technical bar, and play a lead role in hiring and leveling decisions Serve as the final point of technical judgment when the team is deadlocked, and represent the FDE function in executive and cross-org planning forums Qualifications 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, including a demonstrated track record of hands-on technical leadership in production systems and complex enterprise environments Demonstrated success setting technical strategy and direction at an organizational level, shaping how an entire function operates rather than leading initiatives within a single team Proven experience designing and directing production-grade integrations, platforms, or distributed systems across multiple concurrent engagements or teams Excellent technical judgment under high ambiguity, with a track record of making and being accountable for organization-level tradeoffs between customer impact, speed, maintainability, and risk Demonstrated ability to influence and align VP/executive-level stakeholders, internally and at customer organizations, on strategic technical direction Track record of developing senior and staff-level engineers through mentorship, coaching, and technical calibration, with willingness to travel up to 30% for executive engagements and technical reviews Preferred: experience setting technical strategy for LLM, agent framework, retrieval, evaluation, or production AI systems at an organizational level, prior experience as a Staff-level FDE, and experience contributing to hiring bar-raising or leveling frameworks at organizational scale 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…