Head of Customer Engineering
AiPrise · San Jose
Head of Customer Engineering
Location: San Jose
Employment Type: Full time
Location Type: On-site
Why this role exists
AiPrise is building the global compliance operating system for modern fintechs, marketplaces, banks, and platforms. We are trusted by leading financial institutions and process millions of onboarding decisions across KYC, KYB, AML, fraud, and monitoring.
We are past figuring out product market fit. We are now scaling complex, global customer deployments at speed.
Every customer we onboard is a high stakes, high complexity technical lift. Compliance teams are trusting us with their core regulatory workflows, and the integration work, configuration decisions, and workflow design that happen in the first weeks determine whether a customer thrives or churns. Time to first verification is our north star, and customer engineering is where that is won or lost.
We are looking for a Head of Customer Engineering to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team. This person sits at the intersection of the customer and the product team. They are the voice of the customer inside the company, and they make sure every customer is set up for success from day one.
This is a builder, a technical leader, and a customer champion in one role.
What you will own
1. The Forward Deployed Engineering team
Lead, grow, and level up our team of FDEs deployed across our customer base
Set the bar for what great forward deployed work looks like: deep product knowledge, strong engineering judgment, and genuine ownership of customer outcomes
Define how FDEs are staffed against customers by tier, complexity, and region
Build hiring loops, onboarding programs, and career paths that turn strong engineers into exceptional customer-facing ones
2. Customer onboarding and integrations
Own time to first verification as a primary company metric
Design and run the end to end technical onboarding journey from contract signed to live in production
Lead FDEs through integration architecture, workflow configuration, sandbox validation, and go-live for both technical and non technical customers
Create clean handoff rituals from sales to customer engineering to support
Ship onboarding and integration playbooks that scale across SMB, mid market, and enterprise
3. Voice of the customer
Be the strongest advocate for the customer inside the company
Build a structured, high signal feedback loop from the field into product and engineering: what customers are asking for, where they struggle, and what would make them expand
Translate messy customer signal into crisp product requirements, prioritized and backed by evidence
Partner with product on roadmap decisions, bringing real deployment data and customer context to every debate
Close the loop back to customers when their feedback ships
4. Customer success through engineering
Ensure every customer is set up for success: correct integration patterns, sound workflow design, and configurations that will scale with their volume
Own technical escalations end to end, from triage through resolution and postmortem
Partner with engineering on customer impacting incidents and drive fixes with urgency
Use AI aggressively across the team: agents that triage tickets, investigate issues, and accelerate integrations
Build the self serve layer, documentation, and tooling that lets customers move fast without waiting on us
5. Founder level partnership
Act as a thought partner to the founders on customer strategy, deployment models, and scale
Join key customer calls, POCs, enterprise escalations, and critical incidents
Influence tooling, staffing models, and service tier definitions
Represent customer engineering credibly with customers, partners, and investors
What success looks like in 12 to 18 months
Median time to first verification is cut by at least half
Every strategic customer has a clear technical owner and a documented path to success
Product and engineering treat customer engineering as their most trusted signal on what to build next
Customers name their FDE relationship as a reason they stay and expand
Technical escalations resolve faster quarter over quarter, with fewer repeats
The team ships with strong ownership and clarity without founder involvement in daily deployments
Who you are
We are looking for someone who is opinionated, technically sharp, and relentlessly customer driven.
You likely have:
10 plus years in solutions engineering, forward deployed engineering, sales engineering, or technical customer-facing leadership
Experience scaling a customer-facing engineering function at a Series A to Series C B2B SaaS, infrastructure, or fintech company
A track record building an FDE, solutions, or implementation function from scratch
Deep comfort with APIs, integrations, and enterprise technical sales cycles. You can read code, debug an integration, and whiteboard an architecture with a customer's engineering team
Experience translating customer needs into product direction and holding your ground in roadmap debates
Comfort operating with ambiguity, speed, and high ownership
A strong bias toward action over decks
Bonus:
Compliance, KYB, KYC, fraud, payments, or regtech background
Experience across global customer bases including LATAM, Africa, SEA, and MENA
You have deployed AI tooling in a customer-facing engineering org and have strong opinions on where it works
Experience running POCs and technical evaluations against competitors
Familiarity with tooling such as Pylon, Linear, Intercom, or Zendesk
You are:
Able to go from messy customer signal to product requirement to shipped outcome
Comfortable saying no to a customer and explaining why, and equally comfortable pushing product to say yes
Respected by engineers because you are one
Energized by hard problems and real world impact
Excited to build in a fast moving, founder led environment
Why AiPrise
Category defining problem in global trust and compliance
Real scale with millions of checks and global coverage
AI native from the ground up
Strong revenue growth and enterprise traction
Founders who are deeply product and engineering driven
Massive whitespace ahead