Forward Deployed Engineering Lead

About this role

Your Impact Procurement is over 50% of revenue for industrial companies and their biggest lever for profitability. The hard part is not the software, it is that every single customer's reality is different: a different ERP, a different data model, decades of undocumented process. Generic platforms stall exactly there, and that gap is where most enterprise AI value quietly dies. Forward Deployed Engineering is how we close it: engineers who sit inside the customer's environment, build in their data, and turn what they learn into product. This function does not exist at Tacto yet. You will build the motion from the start, collaborating with Product, and discover what Forward Deployed Engineering means for Tacto, figuring out how much value we can generate for leading industrials. Your Tasks - Build the function. Charter, operating model, quality bar, metrics. Bring this function to the next level. - Hire the right talent. The team is there to grow. Hire exceptional Forward Deployed Engineers and build your own high performing team. - Own how we engage customers. Design and establish the processes for how engineers scope, embed, build, and hand over. This is the core of the role, not an afterthought to the technical work. - Build, hands-on, in customer environments. Agents, pipelines, custom logic on top of our platform, in real production data. You lead by shipping. - Turn one-offs into product. Work directly with Product and Engineering to convert what you build at the edge into platform capability. An FDE org that productises nothing is just an expensive consultancy, and you will make sure we never become one. - Lead the first FDEs. Find the rare people who are excellent engineers and credible in front of a Head of IT. Set the standard by being it. - Own the hardest customer rooms. Lead escalations with Heads of Procurement and IT and be the senior presence customers trust. - Be AI-native. Use AI to change what the function is capable of, then measure it, then build it into how the team works. Your Profile - 5+ years building software close to customers: forward deployed or deployment-style engineering, technical program leadership in a product company, or an engineering-heavy path through top-tier consulting at Manager level or above. - You write code and you want to keep writing it. Python and SQL at working level, comfortable with data pipelines and integration architecture. - 1+ years leading engineers, or you have built something from zero and had people follow you into it. - Zero-to-one operator. You are comfortable when the process does not exist yet, and you write it down instead of holding it in your head. - Product instinct. You can tell a one-off from a pattern and you will argue the case either way. - Senior presence with customers, including C-level escalations, and the backbone to be clear about what we will and will not commit to. - Native or C1 German, fluent English. Why This Role is Awesome You are not inheriting a team, you are defining a function that most companies in enterprise AI are only starting to understand they need. Do this well for 12 to 18 months and you own one of Tacto's core technical organisations, with a direct line into the product roadmap and a hand in how leading global industrials adopts AI. What This Role Is - and Isn't - This is not a people-management role with technical decoration. If you want to stop building, this is the wrong job. - This is not consulting. Nobody here bills days. You are measured on what customers can do afterwards and on what made it into the platform. - The first months will be ambiguous by design: you, a handful of accounts, and a blank page. If that reads as risk rather than opportunity, this is not a good fit. Why Tacto - Backed to win big. We are Sequoia and Index-funded with €50M+ behind us. Our founders sit at the same table as the people defining the global AI agenda. We're building Tacto to be the lighthouse for European industrial AI. - A truly AI-native organization, with every resource you could dream of. All the leading AI tools and custom agents at your fingertips, plus dedicated people who keep us at the frontier. - High bar, high speed, genuinely fun. You'll be surrounded by extremely smart and ambitious people who set the bar high and push you to get better every week. Intense, fast, and the opposite of boring. - A front-row seat in the European startup ecosystem. Weekly exposure to leading founders and operators through internal and external events (Lunch & Learns, hackathons, community gatherings). Check out all upcoming and past events here: https://luma.com/tacto - You'll build something that lasts and that matters. You'll help build the company that keeps European industry competitive for the long term. Interview Process 1. Intro call with our Talent team 2. Deep dive with Head of Customer Experience 3. Onsite case study and discussion on future of FDEs OUR BACKGROUND Tacto is building the intelligence layer that connects AI to the physical world of manufacturing, starting with procurement. AI is transforming every industry, but it stops at the factory gate. The knowledge that holds manufacturing together - part costs, suppliers, materials - is scattered across systems and people. Over 50% of a product's cost originates from suppliers, making procurement the single largest cost lever in manufacturing and the missing connection between the digital and the physical world. Yet it still runs on Excel and legacy systems. We're changing that with our Procurement Intelligence Platform, trusted by hundreds of companies running billions of Euros of material. Based in Munich, we are 100+ passionate builders who are in-office, with high expectations, fast growth, and a lot of fun. We are supported by >€50m from Sequoia, Index, and Europe's leading tech entrepreneurs and industry veterans. WHY IT MATTERS Man