Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Job description

Magical is building an agentic AI platform that brings “AI employees” into the workplace to execute repetitive, operationally critical work. Our agents help organizations move faster, reduce manual work, and improve outcomes in areas where reliability matters—particularly healthcare. We work directly with customers to understand complex workflows, deploy AI agents into real operating environments, and turn what we learn into a more powerful and scalable platform. The shift toward agentic work is already underway, and we are building the infrastructure and deployment playbook that will define how it happens. Magical is backed by Greylock, Coatue, Altman Capital, Lightspeed, and other investors behind companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Notion. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for an FDE Manager to lead the team responsible for turning Magical’s platform into reliable, high-impact customer deployments. This is a player-coach role. You will manage and develop a team of Forward Deployed Engineers while remaining close enough to the work to review technical approaches, unblock difficult problems, and raise the quality of execution. You will own the technical success of customer deployments—from solution design and integration through launch, reliability, and ongoing improvement. You will also help ensure that what we learn from each deployment becomes reusable tooling, product functionality, and operating practices for the broader organization. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Lead, coach, and develop a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, creating clear expectations and a consistently high bar for technical execution, ownership, and customer impact. - Own the technical quality and reliability of customer deployments, particularly in high-stakes healthcare environments. - Allocate the team across customer priorities, balance speed with quality, and identify risks before they affect customers or delivery timelines. - Review solution architecture, agent design, prompting strategies, integrations, testing plans, and production-readiness for complex deployments. - Step into the most difficult technical or customer situations to diagnose problems, make decisions, and unblock the team. - Partner closely with Deployment Strategy, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to ensure deployments achieve the intended customer outcome. - Translate recurring customer needs and deployment challenges into clear product requirements and platform improvements. - Establish strong engineering practices for testing, observability, incident response, documentation, and release management across customer deployments. - Build reusable tools, templates, reference implementations, and technical playbooks that make each future deployment faster and less dependent on bespoke FDE effort. - Hire and onboard additional FDEs as the team and customer base grow. - Create an environment where the team moves quickly, communicates directly, learns from failures, and takes responsibility for outcomes. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Customers receive the expected outcomes consistently, with issues detected and resolved before they materially affect the customer. - Deployments become progressively faster and more predictable. - FDEs are able to own increasingly complex work with less escalation and stronger technical judgment. - Repeated customer requirements are converted into reusable platform capabilities rather than solved independently each time. - Product and Engineering receive clear, prioritized feedback grounded in real customer deployments. - The FDE organization scales without a proportional increase in manual effort or ongoing customer support. ABOUT YOU - You have experience managing and developing a team of at least four engineers, solutions engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers, or similarly technical team members. - You have a strong technical foundation, developed through experience in software engineering, QA engineering, solutions engineering, systems integration, implementation engineering, or a related field. - You have led teams responsible for delivering software into real customer environments, not only building software in isolation. - You are comfortable reviewing technical designs, diagnosing production issues, and challenging the team’s approach when necessary. - You are an effective people manager who can coach strong performers, deliver direct feedback, address performance issues, and build accountability without creating unnecessary process. - You communicate well with both technical teams and senior customer stakeholders, particularly when requirements are unclear or something has gone wrong. - You are deeply curious about AI agents, prompting, automation, and multi-agent systems. Prior experience is valuable, but strong technical fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly matter more. - You have a strong bias toward action and consistently demonstrate “show, don’t tell.” - You have high agency and can prioritize, make decisions, and unblock yourself and others without waiting for perfect information. - You are energized by early-stage environments where the playbook is still being created. - You are willing to be hands-on when the team or customer needs it, while remaining focused on building a team and system that can scale beyond you. - You are located in Toronto or willing to relocate. A science, engineering, or similarly technical educational background is helpful, but we care more about what you have built, led, and learned than where you studied. THE REALITY OF THE ROLE This is an early-stage, customer-facing leadership position. Priorities can change quickly, customer problems do not always arrive at convenient times, and some periods will require long or intense working cycles. You should be excited—not surprised—by the opportunity to bring structure to ambiguity, step into difficult situations, and help the team deliver when the path is not yet obvious. WHAT WE OFFER - The opportunity to shape the FDE function and deployment model at an ambitious AI company - Meaningful ownership over how Magical’s technology is applied in real customer environments - A chance to work at the frontier of agentic AI and multi-agent systems - A modern technical stack and access to leading AI tools - Competitive compensation and meaningful equity - Unlimited PTO - Team offsites, with past trips including Iceland, Lisbon, Cancún, and Costa Rica