Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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We are looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to join the Forward-Deployed Engineering (FDE) function at Ava Labs. This is a senior individual contributor role sitting within the Platform Engineering Group, reporting to the Head of Forward Deployed Engineering.

FDE is a partner-facing engineering team that designs and ships bespoke solutions for a small set of high-profile regulated financial institutions deploying on Avalanche and also owns key portions of the developer tooling and SDK surface that those partners (and the broader ecosystem) build against. The team operates through deep technical engagements, not back-to-back calls: weeks of hands-on engineering between syncs is the norm.

The right person brings Avalanche stack fluency, hands-on enterprise/on-prem experience, and AI-native execution, and can translate a Director of Engineering's requirements at a regulated financial institution into a working solution without a handoff chain.

• Own FDE technical delivery across a named set of institutional partners - designing the architecture across the entire Avalanche stack (node / validator setup, failover procedures, interoperability,...) from partner ask to working output

• Pair with Enterprise Go-to-Market on active POCs to close the gap between commercial requirements and production-grade technical solutions

• Represent Avalanche credibly in partner-facing technical settings: sit across from Directors of Engineering at financial institutions and translate bespoke asks into scoped requirements without losing the strategic frame

• Engage in depth, not volume - most weeks are heads-down implementation work punctuated by focused technical syncs, not a meeting-heavy customer-success cadence

• Work hands-on across the Avalanche stack: AvalancheGo, EVM, Interchain Messaging, and validator infrastructure

• Design and implement solutions that operate within the constraints regulated institutions actually run: KMS/HSM remote signing, audit trails, restricted-peer networking, backup/restore procedures, firewall topologies

• Respond to security assessment requests and technical diligence from institutional partners

• Contribute to and maintain the developer tooling and SDK surface owned by FDE. This is the same tooling that underpins partner deployments and the broader Avalanche ecosystem

• Harden, extend, and document tooling driven by recurring institutional requirements, so that the next partner inherits a more capable platform than the last

• Treat tooling work and partner delivery as a single loop: lessons from each engagement land back in the shared surface

• Identify when a one-off partner solution should become a reusable FDE artifact and drive that abstraction

• Build and maintain runbooks, technical documentation, and the FDE Protocol Requests database (Notion-tracked)

• Accelerate conversion timelines for subsequent regulated partners by compounding the institutional playbook with each engagement

• Shadow and contribute to the most complex active engagements early, internalizing the institutional playbook in context

• Take primary FDE ownership of named partners as ramp completes, reducing concentration risk on the team

• Operate as a credible future #2 within FDE, exhibiting mentorship, end-to-end scope ownership, and comfort representing the function externally