Tech Lead - 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 a Tech Lead to raise the technical bar across Magical’s Forward Deployed Engineering team and take on our most difficult customer and platform challenges. This is a highly senior individual-contributor role. You will remain deeply hands-on while providing technical leadership across multiple customers, deployments, and FDE workstreams. You will step into complex or ambiguous situations, quickly understand what is going wrong, and lead the work required to solve it. You will also coach less experienced FDEs, review technical approaches, and help the broader team develop stronger judgment and execution skills. You will report to the Head of Deployments and work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers, Deployment Strategy, Product, and Engineering. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Take the lead on Magical’s most complex, high-risk, or technically ambiguous customer deployments. - Get hands-on in the work—designing agentic workflows, writing and improving prompts, building integrations, debugging failures, analyzing system behavior, and shipping production solutions. - Diagnose difficult issues across customer environments, integrations, agent performance, data quality, and platform behavior. - Provide technical leadership across multiple customers and teams rather than owning only a single project or account. - Review solution designs, implementation plans, testing strategies, and production-readiness for complex workflows. - Coach FDEs through technical problems and help junior team members develop stronger problem-solving, debugging, and systems-thinking skills. - Set an example for technical ownership, execution quality, urgency, and customer focus. - Identify risks, architectural weaknesses, and reliability issues before they become customer-facing problems. - Partner with Product and Engineering to distinguish between deployment-specific issues and platform-level gaps. - Translate recurring customer challenges into reusable platform capabilities, internal tools, reference implementations, and technical standards. - Improve the team’s practices for testing, observability, debugging, incident response, documentation, and release management. - Help define what excellent Forward Deployed Engineering looks like at Magical. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Magical’s technical deployments are delivered on time and thoroughly. - Customer-facing issues are diagnosed accurately, with root causes addressed rather than repeatedly patched. - FDEs make better technical decisions and become more capable of solving complex problems independently. - Technical quality becomes more consistent across customers and workstreams. - Repeated implementations are converted into reusable tools, patterns, and platform improvements. - Product and Engineering receive clear, technically credible feedback from customer deployments. - The organization can take on more complex customers without relying on a small number of people to repeatedly rescue deployments. ABOUT YOU - You have significant experience in software engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, solutions engineering, systems integration, implementation engineering, or a similarly hands-on technical role. - You have operated as a technical lead or senior individual contributor on complex, customer-facing software deployments. - You are comfortable moving across the full problem space—from understanding a customer workflow to debugging an integration, improving agent behavior, and shipping a reliable production solution. - You are an exceptional problem solver who can bring structure to unclear situations and make progress without complete information. - You have strong technical judgment and know when to fix a local implementation, change the architecture, or escalate a platform limitation. - You enjoy being hands-on and are willing to personally take on difficult implementation and debugging work. - You are able to influence and lead other engineers without relying on formal management authority. - You are a strong coach who can explain not only what should change, but how to think about the problem differently. - You communicate clearly with engineers, deployment teams, and customer stakeholders, especially when a project is under pressure. - You care deeply about production reliability, testing, observability, and solving the underlying cause of a problem. - 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 technical playbook is still being created. - 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, solved, and learned than where you studied. THE REALITY OF THE ROLE This is not an advisory or architecture-only position. You will be expected to get into the details, work directly in the implementation, and stay close to a problem until it is solved. You may move between customers, technical domains, and urgent priorities quickly. Some periods will involve intense work, incomplete information, and problems that do not have an obvious owner or solution. You should be excited by the opportunity to step into those situations, create clarity, and lead from the front. WHAT WE OFFER - The opportunity to define the technical standard for Forward Deployed Engineering at Magical - Ownership of some of the company’s most important and technically difficult customer problems - A chance to work at the frontier of agentic AI and multi-agent systems - Significant influence over Magical’s product, platform, and deployment practices - 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