Founding Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Afresh Technologies · San Francisco, CA
About this role
**Founding Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering** **About Afresh** Afresh is an AI platform for grocery that helps enterprise grocers like Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern make smarter decisions across their entire enterprise. With 70% revenue growth in 2025, the platform now prevents over 200 million pounds of food waste annually. **The Role** You'll build and lead the forward deployed engineering team that embeds with enterprise grocery customers, integrating their data and shipping AI systems. This is a player-coach role with strong bias toward leadership—you'll own technical relationships with customer engineering leaders, review architecture, and unblock your team, but most of your time goes to leading execution and customer stakeholders. **Key Responsibilities** • Hire, develop, and retain forward deployed engineers; set technical standards • Lead execution across concurrent customer engagements with clear prioritization • Own technical relationships with customer engineering and data leadership • Develop one reference architecture for AI deployments across all customers • Partner with platform engineers to turn field learnings into product • Travel to customer sites 25-40%, weighted toward kickoffs and readouts **What We're Looking For** • 10+ years in software engineering, solutions architecture, or technical customer-facing roles (2+ years managing engineers) • Experience building a team from 0 to 1 • Executive presence and ability to move between VP-level strategy and technical debugging • Architect's range across ingestion, data modeling, application, and AI • Strong data fluency with SQL and modern cloud platforms (Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake) • Production AI/LLM experience with measurement discipline • Experience delivering inside enterprise environments **Nice to Have** Grocery/retail/supply chain data experience; knowledge graphs or semantic layers in production; vendor-hosted and customer-cloud delivery experience **Why Afresh** • Mission-driven work with direct, visible impact on food waste elimination • Found the forward deployed team from scratch—rare at a production company • Team reports into engineering, not sales • Stay technical with an architect who manages, not a manager who used to code • Bleeding-edge agentic AI development **Location & Compensation** Hybrid (3 days/week in San Francisco) $203,745 - $275,655 + meaningful early-stage equity + comprehensive benefits *Note: Not eligible for company sponsorship*
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