Hire a Senior or Staff FDE
For the accounts you can't afford to lose. We find senior FDEs who have led deployments end to end and can be trusted alone with your toughest customer.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Senior or Staff FDE Actually Does
Be the technical owner a customer's exec team trusts with the whole rollout.
Shape the architecture across your product and the customer's stack.
Mentor newer FDEs and step in when a deployment goes sideways.
Turn patterns from the field into roadmap decisions.
Why Hire Your Senior or Staff FDE Through Us
Vetted on Both Halves
Tested on the hands-on skills this role needs and in a live customer role-play. Nobody reaches your loop untested.
Run by a Former FDE
Asher Cohen, a former FDE who has sat in the customer's office at midnight, is on every search. He knows which interview answers fall apart on site.
A Shortlist, Not a Pile
Scorecards and role-play clips instead of a stack of resumes. If they'd lose the room, you never see them.
Signs You Need One
- Your largest customer needs a single, senior technical owner.
- Your first FDEs are stretched and need someone to learn from.
- Deployments keep hitting the same architectural walls.
- Your founders are still the escalation path for every big account.
What Great Looks Like
- Has taken a deployment from signed contract to production more than once.
- Stays calm in a room full of the customer's VPs.
- Knows when to build custom and when to push back to product.
- Makes the FDEs around them better.
Running the Interviews Yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the questions we use on every candidate. Take it and run our loop in yours.
Sample Job Description
A first draft you can paste into your applicant tracking system and make your own.
About the role. You'll own the technical relationship with our most important customers, from first scoping session to production and expansion.
You'll lead complex deployments, design solutions across our platform and customer systems and mentor the FDE team.
You have [6+] years of engineering experience, including [2+] years leading customer-facing technical work.
Hiring a Senior or Staff FDE: Your Questions
Still have questions? Talk to a former FDE, or email hello@forwarddeployedhiring.com.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
Senior FDE or Head of FDE?
If you need someone to own your biggest accounts, hire a senior FDE. If you need someone to hire, manage and design the team, hire a Head of FDE. Need both today? Start with the senior FDE. A great one can grow into the Head role.
Do senior searches take longer?
They can. There are fewer senior FDEs, most aren't looking and the good ones want to know who they'd report to and how much room they'd have before they take a call. We go to them directly and start that conversation for you. If your bar narrows the pool, we'll tell you up front, not in week four.
Do senior FDEs still write code?
The good ones do, every week. A senior FDE who has stopped coding is an account manager with a technical title. Every senior candidate takes the same technical screen as everyone else, scored to a higher bar, so you'll know.
How long does it take to hire a Senior or Staff FDE?
Your first vetted shortlist arrives in under 5 days from kickoff. Every candidate on it has passed our core vetting and the role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. The biggest factor is how fast your team can run final interviews. We handle the scheduling around them so nothing stalls.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
Every candidate has passed our core vetting, run by us: a customer role-play plus a skills test built for this role. For engineering roles, that's a technical screen. For strategists, it's a business case. For your search, shortlisted candidates also run a short role-play built around your customer. You get a scorecard and a 3-minute clip, so you can judge for yourself. Your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. Meet every candidate on your shortlist with no commitment. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire is backed by our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate is strong on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if it means restarting the search. Our concerns go on every scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait a week than make the wrong hire.
What if the hire doesn't work out?
If your hire leaves or isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find you a replacement. We rerun the search with what we learned, vetted the same way, so the second shortlist is sharper than the first.
See Your First Senior or Staff FDE Candidates in Under 5 Days
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.