Forward Deployed Team Lead (Enterprise AI Applications)

Forward Deployed Team Lead (Enterprise AI Applications)

Fractal is a strategic AI partner to Fortune 500 companies with a vision to power every human decision in the enterprise. Fractal is building a world where individual choices, freedom, and diversity are the greatest assets. An ecosystem where human imagination is at the heart of every decision.

Where no possibility is written off, only challenged to get better. We believe that a true Fractalite is the one who empowers imagination with intelligence. Fractal has been featured as a Great Place to Work by The Economic Times in partnership with the Great Place to Work® Institute and recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ and a ‘Vendor to Watch’ by Gartner.

Please visit Fractal | Intelligence for Imagination for more information about Fractal

Note: This position is not eligible for Immigration Sponsorship at this time.

Please also note that this role is specifically located in the San Francisco Bay Area and requires 100% onsite availability. If you are not local, we provide weekly travel or relocation.

About the Role:

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Team Lead — a rare operator who can own a strategic enterprise account from first conversation to production deployment. This is not a consulting role or a presales role. You'll combine strong technical architecture with the breadth of a product owner and the presence of a trusted client advisor.

You'll embed directly with customers, scope complex AI workflows, design and build the integrations that make them real, and drive them through to measurable business outcomes. One account at a time with end-to-end ownership.

If you've shipped enterprise software end-to-end, know how to operate in a customer environment without a safety net, and want to see your work drive real business outcomes, we'd like to talk.

What You'll Do:

• Own the technical architecture. Design the data flow, integration topology, identity model, and deployment architecture across your customer's infrastructure — and be accountable for it in production.
• Write production code. Backend services, data pipelines, APIs, integrations. You close the gaps yourself.
• Drive product ownership. Own the deployment roadmap. Execute the statement of work. Decide what's in scope, what's a one-off, and what should feed back into the platform.
• Lead the project. Own the plan, milestones, risks, and dependencies. When something slips, you know first and flag first.
• Communicate with clarity. Run customer working sessions, brief executive sponsors, and write status updates that senior stakeholders actually read.
• Ship to production. Take deployments from dev through UAT into production — integrating with customer data warehouses, ERP/CRM systems, and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Ensure enterprise readiness. Configure, secure, and monitor the platform to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, data residency, and more).
• Feed field learnings back to product. Your deployments make the platform smarter for the next one.
• Partner on growth. Identify expansion opportunities within the account, surface new use cases, and support renewal conversations.

What We're Looking For:

• 6+ years shipping production software, with 2+ years as a tech lead or senior IC owning delivery end-to-end.
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, Go, or C++.
• Demonstrated ownership of systems taken from zero to production in a commercial or enterprise context.
• Deep vertical expertise in at least one domain — financial services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, or defense — to accelerate time-to-value and credibility with customer stakeholders.
• Enterprise stakeholder experience — comfortable running both exec-level conversations and deep technical design sessions.
• Familiarity with enterprise data environments: cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift), REST/GraphQL APIs, and common ERP or CRM platforms.
• Modern deployment practices: CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), cloud-native services, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent).
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus Points:

• Prior experience as a tech lead or staff engineer at a SaaS or enterprise software vendor with a forward-deployed or professional services motion.
• Experience with AI/ML platform deployments or data-heavy enterprise applications at scale.
• Hands-on with major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP, including managed ML/AI services.
• Background in regulated industries (healthcare/life sciences, manufacturing, energy) where compliance and change management are part of the delivery.
• A track record of turning messy, ambiguous customer problems into clean, repeatable deployment patterns.

Pay: The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to skill sets;

experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled. At Fractal, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

A reasonable estimate of the current range is: $120,000 - $180,000. In addition, you may be eligible for a discretionary bonus for the current performance period.

Benefits:

As a full-time employee of the company or as an hourly employee working more than 30 hours per week, you will be eligible to participate in the health, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability plans in accordance with the plan documents, which may be amended from time to time. You will be eligible for benefits on the first day of employment with the Company. In addition, you are eligible to participate in the Company 401(k) Plan after 30 days of employment, in accordance with the applicable plan terms.

The Company provides for 11 paid holidays and 12 weeks of Parental Leave. We also follow a “free time” PTO policy, allowing you the flexibility to take the time needed for either sick time or vacation.

Fractal provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.