Overview

Head of Forward Deployed Engineering Jobs in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia at Stringit Ventures

Title: Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Company: Stringit Ventures

Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Head of Forward Deployed Engineering

Stringit Ventures builds intelligence layers for mid-market enterprises in Australia and New Zealand. We work embedded inside client firms across commercial real estate, financial services, professional services, private capital, and construction and industrials. Forward Deployed Engineers are the senior technical leads on those engagements. 

Purpose of the Role 

You will be the named technical lead on a Stringit client engagement: the person who runs discovery, designs the solution, builds the senior parts personally, directs the delivery team on the rest, and owns the engineering outcome and the technical relationship on the client side. You will report directly to the Chief Technology Officer, coordinate with the Chief Engineer on delivery and resourcing, and work alongside the Founding AI Engineer and the broader Stringit delivery team. 

Key Responsibilities 

  • Own the technical outcome of one or two concurrent client engagements end to end. 
  • Own discovery: map the client's existing systems and workflows, identify the two or three points where Stringit produces evidence of value first, and translate that into a phased build plan. 
  • Own solution design: choose the right shape for the engagement (n8n workflow over the existing stack, typed module against the client's ERP or CRM, ingestion pipeline into the Stringit graph, custom backend) and defend the choice. 
  • Build the senior parts of the codebase yourself: schema, integration design, retrieval and prompt design, the parts the client will judge Stringit on. 
  • Direct the Stringit delivery team (PM, BA, developers, UI/UX) on the rest of the build, in coordination with the Chief Engineer on resourcing and the Chief Technology Officer on architecture. 
  • Run the engagement on the ground: weekly client steerco, workshops, demos, scope defence, risk surfacing, on-site days where on-site matters. 
  • Coordinate with the founders on commercial framing, scope changes, and renewal positioning. Carry the engagement code on every artefact. 
  • Compound the engagement back into the Stringit product: each engagement should leave a new connector, module pattern, or graph schema element behind. 

First 90-Day Deliverables 

  • One client engagement carried as the named technical lead, with sign-off from the Chief Technology Officer. 
  • A documented discovery output for at least one engagement, accepted by the client and the founder owning the relationship. 
  • A phased solution design and build plan for at least one engagement, in productive use by the delivery team. 
  • At least one senior-built component in production or staging on a live engagement. 
  • One documented compound contribution (connector, module pattern, or graph schema element) fed back into the Stringit product surface. 

Required Experience: Must Have 

  • 6+ years building production software at backend lead level, with personal responsibility for the architecture of at least one shipped system. 
  • Real fluency in TypeScript or Python, Postgres, and at least one major cloud (AWS preferred), and working knowledge of one enterprise system in Stringit's domain: Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, Microsoft 365, or Google Workspace. 
  • Modern AI engineering practice: embeddings, retrieval, evaluation, prompt design, and at least one shipped system where the LLM was load-bearing rather than decorative. 
  • Sophisticated, consulting-grade understanding of the current frontier model landscape (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and open-source equivalents): when to use which, evaluation discipline, prompt and retrieval patterns, agent design, and the ability to advise senior client stakeholders on best practice with conviction. 
  • Direct client-facing experience: running workshops, writing briefs, defending scope, holding the technical line in front of senior client stakeholders. 
  • Calibrated judgement on when to ship the fast version and when to invest in the durable version, with the ability to articulate the trade-off to a CTO and a CFO in the same meeting. 
  • Australian work rights and willingness to work hybrid out of 85 William Street, Darlinghurst, with periodic client on-site days in Sydney, Melbourne and regional Australia. 

Required Experience: Preferred 

  • Domain background in one of Stringit's verticals: commercial real estate, financial services, professional services, private capital, or construction, industrials and others. 
  • Modern data foundation in production: Databricks, Snowflake, ClickHouse, MongoDB, Elastic, Neo4j, Redis or Zilliz. 
  • Data movement, integration and governance: dbt, Fivetran, Workato, Boomi, Confluent, Matillion, Alation, Atlan, Collibra, Immuta or BigID. 
  • Foundation models and the agentic build stack: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, Hugging Face, AssemblyAI, Deepgram, LangChain, Glean, Dataiku, Patronus AI or Weights and Biases. 
  • AI operations, observability and reliability: Arize, Datadog, DataRobot, Anyscale, Cast AI, Protect AI or WEKA. 
  • Engineering background in a regulated environment: financial services, health, defence, or public sector. 

Key Competencies 

  • Engagement ownership: the client treats this person as the technical authority on Stringit's side, and the delivery team treats them as the source of the design. 
  • Solution judgement: the right tool chosen for the engagement, not the most interesting tool, and the pick is defensible. 
  • Senior craft: the parts personally built lift the quality of the rest of the engagement. 
  • Commercial calibration: scope creep pushed back early, risk surfaced early, engagement margin protected without damaging the client relationship. 
  • Compound mindset: every engagement leaves something behind in the Stringit product, not only in the client's system. 

Success Metrics

  • Client engagements carried as named technical lead, with founder-confirmed client satisfaction. 
  • Engagement converted from discovery into a follow-on build phase with this person as the named lead. 
  • Compounded contributions back into the Stringit product (connectors, modules, schema, patterns) traceable to this person's engagements. 
  • Demonstrated mentoring of at least one delivery team member into a more senior role on a Stringit engagement. 
  • Zero engagements escalated to the Chief Technology Officer or the founders for delivery quality reasons attributable to this role. 

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