Team Lead Forward Deployed Engineering

YOUR MISSION:

As Team Lead Forward Deployed Engineering (f/m/d) at Parloa, you'll be on the front lines of enterprise AI adoption—leading a high-impact team of FDEs which delivers our most strategic enterprise deployments. Your mission is to ensure our consistent deployment excellence: predictable delivery, strong engineering quality, and fast unblocking in complex enterprise environments—while staying technically credible yourself.

FDEs are our in-field engineers. They build what doesn't exist yet, adapt architecture to enterprise realities, and engineer integrations across systems and APIs to make deployments successful. As Team Lead, you make that work repeatable and reliable across multiple customer projects—through strong delivery leadership, clear priorities, and hands-on technical guidance.

IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL:

• Lead and develop the team: hire, coach, and grow a team of FDEs; set clear expectations; run 1:1s, feedback cycles, and performance development.
• Own capacity planning and staffing: allocate engineers across parallel strategic projects, manage load and utilization, and anticipate delivery bottlenecks early.
• Drive project delivery management: own engineering delivery across deployments—milestones, dependencies, risk management, escalation paths, and stakeholder alignment.
• Establish time tracking and delivery visibility: implement lightweight tracking and reporting that creates trusted insight into effort, progress, and capacity (without bureaucracy).
• Provide technical leadership and escalation support: guide architecture and implementation choices, review designs/code when needed, and unblock high-severity issues in production environments.
• Create scalable field engineering practices: build reusable patterns, playbooks, and standards that improve reliability, maintainability, and speed across deployments.
• Shape the product via field learnings: translate recurring customer needs into clear productization proposals and partner with Product/Core Engineering to reduce one-offs over time.
• Partner with customer engineering and enterprise stakeholders: collaborate directly with customer teams (architecture, security, platform) to deliver outcomes and build long-term technical trust.

OUR TECH STACK: 

Typescript, NodeJS, OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, MCP

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE:

• Experience level: 8+ years in software engineering, systems integration, DevOps, or data engineering roles with meaningful production responsibility.
• People leadership: proven ability to lead and develop engineers (e.g., formal management, team lead responsibility, coaching, hiring, performance growth).
• Enterprise delivery track record: demonstrated success delivering complex technical projects in large enterprise environments with multiple stakeholders and constraints.
• Technical breadth and depth: strong capabilities across backend engineering, APIs, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and databases—able to review designs and guide production decisions.
• Hands-on effectiveness: able to personally own and drive smaller technical workstreams end-to-end and to jump into debugging/implementation when necessary.
• Operational excellence: strong planning, prioritization, capacity thinking, and risk management; creates delivery clarity without unnecessary process overhead.
• Customer-facing communication: confident and credible with customer engineering teams and senior technical stakeholders; clear written and verbal communication.

Strong plus: experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered systems (agent workflows, orchestration, evaluation, vector DBs, guardrails), ideally in forward-deployed or solutions engineering environments.

WHATS IN IT FOR YOU:

• Join a diverse team of 40+ nationalities with flat hierarchies and a collaborative company culture.
• Opportunity to build and scale your career at the intersection of customer-facing roles and engineering in a dynamic startup on its journey to become an international leader in SaaS platforms for Conversational AI.
• Deutschland ticket, Urban Sports Club, Job Rad, Nilo Health, weekly sponsored office lunches.
• Competitive compensation and equity package.
• Flexible working hours, 28 vacation days and workation opportunities.
• Access to a training and development budget for continuous professional growth.
• Regular team events, game nights, and other social activities.
• Work from a home and/or our beautiful office(s) in the heart of Berlin or Munich with adjustable desks, social areas, fresh fruits, cereals, and drinks.

Recruiter video call → Meet your manager → Technical Interviews → Bar Raiser Interview

Parloa is one of the fastest growing startups in the world of Generative AI and customer service. Parloa's voice-first GenAI platform for contact centers is built on the best AI technology to automate customer service with natural-sounding conversations for outstanding experiences on all communication channels. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, Parloa creates intelligent phone and chat solutions for businesses that turn contact centers into value centers by boosting customer service efficiency. The Parloa platform resolves the majority of customer queries quickly and automatically, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues and relationships. Parloa was founded in 2018 by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald and today employs over 400+ people in Berlin, Munich, and New York.

When you join Parloa, you become part of a dynamic and innovative team made up of over 34 nationalities that's revolutionizing an entire industry. We're passionate about growing together and creating opportunities for personal and professional development. With our recent $350 million Series D investment, we're expanding globally and looking for talented individuals to join us on this exciting journey.

Do you have questions about Parloa, the role, or our team before you apply? Please feel free to get in touch with our Hiring Team.

Parloa is committed to upholding the highest data protection standards for our clients' and employees' data. All our employees are instrumental in ensuring the utmost care, GDPR, and ISO compliance, including ISO 27001, in handling sensitive information.

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* We provide equal opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, national origin, disability status, socioeconomic background and other characteristics.