# Head of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) at Beacon

- Company: Beacon
- What the company does: Beacon acquires and grows essential businesses. With our centralized platform, we empower founders with the technology and expertise to better serve their customers. Backed by General Catalyst.
- Company website: https://beaconsoftware.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-09-18
- Apply by: 2026-11-02
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/beaconsoftware/160dd77f-ba83-4eaa-8759-ac99f699130f
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/beacon-head-of-forward-deployed-engineering-fde/

## About the role

The doctrine: FDE, not consulting. An FDE delivers the outcome and compresses what they learned back into the platform, so the next deployment is cheaper. You hold the line: every engagement is scoped as a wedge with a written start, end, and deliverable; every deployment owes the platform a primitive, a playbook, or an agent workflow whose outcomes the platform can observe; every engagement leaves the portco's own engineers more capable.

## What they're looking for

- Still a strong generalist engineer: comfortable in someone else's codebase within a day and has shipped LLM-native software in production with evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking. You can review an FDE's wedge and know whether it will compound
- Operator instincts. You read a P&L, you understand why a churn-save beats a feature launch this quarter, and you can sit across from a GM whose incentives are EBITDA-driven and land a deployment that borrows from the present to pay for the future
- Allocates ruthlessly and says so plainly. You have told a real business with a real GM that it is not where scarce engineering goes this quarter, kept the relationship, and been right
- Writes clearly and works transparently: async, in public channels, decisions documented where anyone can find them. At Beacon the wedge memo, the GM update, and the post-deployment retro are the work
- Bonus: Palantir-style FDE background, private equity or holdco operating exposure, time inside vertical SaaS, experience taking a portfolio of legacy stacks onto shared rails
- Our Values at Beacon Software

Tags: Engineering