Manager - Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Manager – Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)
Department: Customer Support / Forward Deployed Engineering
Experience: 6–10 Years
Employment Type: Full-Time
Location: Gurgaon, Haryana (US-hours overlap)
About Spyne
Spyne is rebuilding the $12B+ automotive software stack from the ground up, giving dealers the AI-powered tools they need to sell more cars, faster. Founded by ex-Amazon, Cox, and OYO operators, Spyne has grown 30x in under three years and now serves 1,500+ dealerships across the US.
The company entered the market through Studio AI, a visual merchandising platform powered by 80+ proprietary AI models that transforms raw car photos into studio-quality images, 360-degree spins, and videos in minutes. Deeply integrated with 60+ dealer tools, from DMS and CRM platforms to major automotive marketplaces, Studio AI has become the trusted foundation inside dealer workflows nationwide.
Now, Spyne is breaking into a much larger opportunity with Vini AI, a conversational Voice AI agent that handles inbound and outbound calls, books test drives, follows up on leads, and manages service appointments 24/7 without human intervention. Vini bookings have grown 7x in six months, and dealers who add Vini on top of Studio see ACV expansions of 4–7x.
Together, the two products are converging into a full-stack Retail AI platform covering inventory management, digital retail, and customer relationship management.
Backed by Accel, Vertex Ventures, and Storm Ventures, Spyne is targeting $50M ARR by the end of 2026 and positioning itself to become the category-defining AI platform for the modern dealership.
Why This Role Exists
Our support team has changed. The people who used to log tickets and pass them to Engineering now diagnose and fix most issues themselves. They correct dealer configurations and data, repair broken DMS, CRM, and marketplace integrations, and ship small product code fixes.
They are Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), and the team needs a leader who is an engineer first.
This role combines two skill sets that rarely sit in one person:
1. An engineer who still ships. You have written production code, remain hands-on today, and can pick up the hardest escalation in the queue and fix it yourself.
2. An operator who understands support deeply. You know how to triage, set priorities by customer impact, run an SLA engine, manage incidents, and keep a queue healthy when 30 things break on a Monday morning in Texas.
This is a player-coach role. Expect to spend roughly half your time as the senior-most FDE on the team and the other half running the team, the queue, and the partnership with Engineering and Product.
What You Will Own
1. Hands-On Fixing (About 50% of Your Time)
Take the most complex and highest-severity escalations yourself: debug across logs, APIs, databases, and integration payloads, find the root cause, and ship the fix.
Work across the FDE scope:
Configuration and data fixes: Dealer and rooftop setup, inventory and feed sync, and data corrections.
Integration issues: DMS, CRM, and marketplace feeds and APIs, including CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, Dealertrack, VinSolutions, and listing marketplaces.
Product code fixes: Contained bug fixes and small enhancements in product repositories through code review and the normal release process.
Review your team's fixes and pull requests. Set the bar for code quality, testing, and safe changes in production.
Know where FDE scope ends. FDEs fix issues that do not require architectural changes. When an issue needs a design change, hand it to core Engineering with a clean reproduction, the dealer impact, and a proposed direction—not just a ticket.
2. Triage, Prioritisation & SLA Management
Own the severity framework (P0–P3) and define it by dealer impact, not by who is shouting the loudest.
Prioritise issues based on business criticality. For example, inventory not going live on a dealer's website or marketplaces, leads or appointments not reaching the dealer's CRM, and DMS sync failures take precedence over cosmetic issues because they cost the dealer money every day they remain unresolved.
Run the SLA engine end to end: first-response and resolution SLAs by severity and customer tier, breach alerts, escalation paths, and weekly SLA reviews.
Prioritise ruthlessly across competing demands: live incidents, enterprise dealer-group escalations, onboarding blockers, and the long tail of the backlog.
Run incident management, including on-call rotation across India and US overlap hours, incident command for P0/P1 incidents, dealer-facing status communication with Customer Success, and blameless post-mortems with tracked action items.
Keep the queue healthy by tracking backlog age, reopen rate, resolution time by severity, and the share of issues resolved within the FDE team without core Engineering escalation.
3. Fix Quality & Production Safety
Define how FDEs make changes in production: access controls, peer review, testing, rollback plans, and an audit trail for every configuration, data, and code change.
Protect dealer data. Dealer and consumer data is customer data, and production access is a privilege with clear rules.
Build runbooks and diagnostic tooling so recurring issues get fixed in minutes, not hours.
4. Turn Recurring Issues into Permanent Fixes
Classify every issue as a bug, configuration gap, integration failure, product gap, or documentation gap, and track the top recurring causes.
Partner with Engineering and Product to eliminate the top recurring issues every quarter through permanent fixes, self-serve tooling, or product changes, so the same ticket never shows up twice.
Represent the dealer in product and engineering reviews with data, not anecdotes.
Make sure every launch is FDE-ready before it reaches dealers, with runbooks, known issues, and access in place.
5. Automation & AI Leverage
Use AI coding and automation tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar tools to make the team faster.
Build automated diagnostics, auto-triage workflows, log and payload analysis, and scripts that turn common fixes into one-step actions.
Push routine L1 queries towards AI-powered and self-serve resolution so FDEs spend their time on problems that require engineering judgement.
6. Build and Develop the Team
Lead, hire, and develop a team of 5–10 FDEs.
Build a skills matrix and a growth path from Support Engineer to Senior FDE.
Coach the team on debugging methods, code quality, customer communication, and judgement on when to fix and when to escalate.
Design coverage for US dealer hours from Gurgaon, including on-call, handoffs, and escalation, without burning the team out.
How Success Is Measured
SLA attainment by severity, with fewer breaches quarter over quarter.
Mean time to resolution for P0/P1 issues.
Share of issues resolved within the FDE team without core Engineering escalation.
Reopen rate and fix quality, measured by the absence of regressions from FDE changes.
Recurring issues permanently eliminated per quarter.
Dealer CSAT on escalated issues.
Team retention and growth.
What We Are Looking For
Must-Have Requirements
6–10 years of total experience, with at least 4 years of hands-on experience as a Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Integration Engineer, or Technical Support Engineer who has shipped code to production.
Recent hands-on coding experience, ideally within the last 12–18 months. You can read an unfamiliar codebase, write and review code, and debug in production.
2+ years of experience leading engineers, either as a manager or a tech lead, with real responsibility for people, priorities, and delivery.
Strong working knowledge of at least one backend language, such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Go, along with SQL, REST APIs, webhooks, Git, and reading logs and monitoring dashboards.
Deep understanding of technical support operations, including severity and priority frameworks, SLA design and enforcement, escalation paths, incident management and on-call, post-mortems, and queue and backlog management.
Hands-on experience with ticketing and incident-management tools such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or similar, including configuring workflows, routing, and SLA policies.
Sound judgement on when to fix an issue immediately, when to apply a workaround, and when to escalate. You can explain a technical trade-off to an engineer and a frustrated customer in the same hour.
Clear written and spoken English for US customers and internal stakeholders.
Strong Preferences
Experience in B2B SaaS with complex third-party integr

Work arrangement
No