As an FDE Manager, you will oversee a group of engineers through complex, highly critical customer deployments while taking full accountability for both technical quality and business impact. You will be a champion for results, ensuring that your team’s custom solutions are not only effective for the client but also strengthen Candid’s core platform for the future

What You’ll Do

• Lead and Grow the Team: Recruit, mentor, and support a high-performing team of FDEs, helping them navigate complex customer environments and providing direct, actionable feedback.
• Own End-to-End Delivery: Own the execution and technical quality of production systems, ensuring they meet industry best-in-class standards for durability and performance.
• Drive Strategic Alignment: Partner closely with Product, Sales, and Internal/Customer Leadership teams to ensure fieldwork informs our product roadmap and supports safe deployment at scale.
• Codify Excellence: Translate field experience into tools, playbooks, and sharp feedback for Product and Research teams to create leverage for the wider organization.
• Manage High-Pressure Deployments: Lead teams through the technical challenges of "going live" with large organizations, including integrations, custom configurations, and real-time issue resolution.
• Operational Excellence: Make data-driven decisions to improve reliability and scale while eliminating friction and redundancies in the delivery model.

Who You Are

• You have a B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Math or a related field of study.
• You have 5+ years of experience in a Software Engineering Leadership position, ideally managing a team of customer-facing engineers.
• You have great executive presence; you have demonstrated success in customer-facing roles and are comfortable working closely with customer executive and leadership teams.
• You’ve successfully led people and teams to shipping high-quality features in strategic product areas.
• You’ve managed and delivered ambitious technical projects from prototype to production.
• You have a track record of excellent technical decision making; you know the right architecture and patterns to build functional, durable, and maintainable product.
• You know how to manage in multiple directions, including laterally and upward: you know how to advocate for yourself and your team: where to get into the weeds and where to delegate.
• You have successfully interviewed, hired, and mentored engineering teams. You collaborate well with staffing partners and stakeholders through all phases of the hiring lifecycle and are a talent magnet.
• You’re a clear and concise communicator; you enjoy the challenge of explaining complicated ideas in simple terms, both in-person and in writing.

Pay Transparency

The estimated starting annual base salary range for this position is $207,000 to $304,000 USD. The listed range is a guideline from Pave data, and the actual base salary may be modified based on factors including job-related skills, experience/qualifications, interview performance, market data, etc. Total compensation for this position may also include equity, sales incentives (for sales roles), and employee benefits. Given Candid Health’s funding and size, we heavily value the potential upside from equity in our compensation package. Further note that Candid Health has minimal hierarchy and titles, but has broad ranges of experience represented within roles.

Testimonial: Hear from one of our FDEs at Candid!

What does your day-to-day look like?

“My day-to-day varies a lot, which is one of my favorite aspects of the job! Some days, it is similar to a typical software engineering role where I am writing and reviewing code. Other days, I am working with my team to design a solution to a problem or scoping out requirements for a new feature. A major difference in the day-to-day from my experiences in a traditional software engineering role is that I am frequently interfacing directly with our customers. We talk about what we can do to improve their experience as Candid customers, and then get to go execute on those opportunities. We work closely with our teammates on the Strategy and Operations team to understand customer requirements and devise solutions for our customer’s problems.”

What’s the coolest thing you’ve accomplished so far? Any notable customer outcomes you’d like to highlight?

“Our team supports the engineering efforts behind going live with new practices for our largest customers. This often involves enabling the integrations with their systems and third party vendors, developing features to support new workflows, and setting up custom configurations for new customers. Since starting 6 months ago, I have contributed to successful launches with 2 of the largest organizations on Candid. For both of these customers, my team was on-site to resolve issues in real-time and deploy updates based on the signal that we gather from observing users on Candid for the first time.”

What do you like most about your role?

“I love that in my role no day is the same. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, I get to work on all parts of the app depending on what is most important to the customer. Additionally, we have the privilege of interfacing directly with our customers. Seeing the look on our customers' faces after resolving a pain point that they mentioned just a day before is priceless!”

What are some examples of skills that are important for your team/role?

“The skills that are important on the Forward Deployed Engineering team differ slightly from a traditional software engineering role. Of course, a strong technical skillset is important when developing software, but there are some nuances in this role that require a unique skillset. We are often not provided with explicit product requirements, but rather a problem statement or a desired capability. The ability to translate that into requirements, implementation specifications, and a realistic timeline is crucial. The role also requires a lot of collaboration. Since we do not have ownership over a specific product domain, but rather customer outcomes, we are often contributing to products owned by other teams. Being able to learn about an unfamiliar system, ask good questions, and consider tradeoffs is key to success as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer.”