About GreyLabs AI
GreyLabs AI is building the voice operating system for India's BFSI. Our Agentic Voice AI platform helps banks, insurers, NBFCs, and fintechs automate and humanize millions of customer conversations - across sales, collections, customer service, and compliance - in multiple Indian languages.
In under two years, we've scaled to 50+ enterprise clients including RBL Bank, AU Small Finance Bank, IDFC FIRST Bank, SBI Life, ICICI Prudential Life, Motilal Oswal - processing hundreds of millions of conversations. We raised ₹85 Crores in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital with Z47, and were recognized for Best Use of AI in Fintech at IFTA 2025.
The Role
We're hiring an FDE Lead to own the forward deployment function at GreyLabs AI.
This is a player-coach role. You'll lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers - and grow it - while staying close enough to the work to know when something's going wrong before a customer does. You'll set the standard for how the team engages with enterprise customers, how implementations are structured, and how the FDE function scales without losing the quality and trust it's built.
The FDE team at GreyLabs sits at the intersection of tech and customer delivery. That means being in the room for strategic accounts - across the table from banking ops leads, CTO offices, and product heads at large financial institutions - while simultaneously making sure your team of FDEs can run similar conversations without you in them. One week you might be leading an architecture review for a major bank's collections deployment and coaching an FDE through a difficult stakeholder conversation. The next, you're working with Tech to turn a pattern you've seen across six customer implementations into a platform feature, or redesigning how the team runs handoffs from Sales so go-live timelines tighten.
This role demands technical credibility, team leadership, and the commercial instincts to understand what enterprise customers actually need versus what they say they want. If you've led technical teams in customer-facing environments and found that the best leverage isn't doing the work yourself - it's building a team that executes it consistently - this role was built for you.
What You'll Do
Lead the FDE function
- Own the team of FDEs end-to-end: hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and performance management as the team scales
- Define how the function operates - account assignment models, delivery standards, escalation paths, and what successful go-live actually means
- Work closely with Sales, Ops, Customer Success, and Tech to ensure FDEs are set up to succeed on every engagement, not firefighting from behind
Be the senior technical presence on strategic accounts
- Take point on high-complexity or high-stakes enterprise accounts where your experience changes the outcome
- Lead architecture and integration reviews, run executive-level workshops, and hold the technical relationship with customers who need a senior anchor
- Participate in pre-sales conversations where deal complexity - multi-system integrations, large-scale deployments, regulated environments - warrants your involvement early
Systematize what works
- Reduce time-to-go-live across the portfolio by identifying recurring friction points in every implementation and fixing the root cause - not just the instance
- Build reusable assets that make the team faster without cutting corners: integration playbooks, reference architectures, implementation templates, internal tooling
- Establish the delivery operating rhythm - milestones, reviews, escalation criteria - so the team operates consistently whether you're in the room or not
Close the loop with Tech
- Turn field patterns into product input. Individual FDEs surface insights; you make sure those insights are prioritized, structured, and acted on
- Identify where platform gaps are slowing the team down and advocate for fixes that improve every future deployment, not just the current one
Stay technical when it matters
- Review customer integrations before they go live, weigh in on architectural decisions where the stakes are high, and write code when the situation genuinely calls for it
- Be the person who can read a production issue, understand what broke and why, and make a judgment call - not just escalate it
What We're Looking For
Must-Haves
- 5-8 years of experience in technical roles, with a meaningful portion in customer-facing delivery - forward deployment, solutions engineering, implementation leadership, or technical consulting
- Experience managing or leading a team of technical ICs - you've owned people's growth, made hard calls, and built a team culture, not just coordinated work
- Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with system integration: REST APIs, webhooks, authentication patterns, data pipelines - you can review an integration design and spot the problem before it reaches production
- Comfortable in front of enterprise stakeholders at multiple levels - from engineering teams to business ops leads - and experienced enough to know that what the customer asks for and what they need are often different things
- Track record of improving delivery: reduced onboarding timelines, reusable frameworks, or repeatable processes you built that made a team faster, not just a single engagement better
- Ownership mindset at the function level: you hold yourself accountable to customer outcomes across the portfolio, not just the accounts you're personally on.
Strong Signals (not checkboxes)
- You've led an FDE, implementation engineering, or solutions team - ideally at a SaaS company deploying into enterprise environments with real integration complexity
- You've taken a team that was reactive and inconsistent in its delivery and made it systematic - without turning it into a process-heavy org that slows things down
- You've been the senior technical voice in a customer escalation, held the relationship, resolved the issue, and came out with more trust than you went in with
- You've built something field-specific - a playbook, a reusable integration, an internal tool - that measurably improved the team's next five engagements
- You understand BFSI - not necessarily as a domain expert, but enough to move quickly in environments where compliance, data sensitivity, and enterprise procurement timelines are real constraints
- You find voice AI, conversational systems, and real-time customer interaction infrastructure genuinely interesting - not just a category you've landed in.
Why GreyLabs AI
- You'll build a function, not just manage a team. The FDE model at GreyLabs is young and high-performing. As the Lead, you're not inheriting a mature org - you're shaping how it scales. The decisions you make in the next 12 months will define how FDEs operate two years from now.
- The feedback loop is immediate and real. This isn't research or prototyping - the systems FDEs deploy handle millions of live conversations for India's largest financial institutions. When something works, you see it in production metrics within days.
- The career surface area is unusually wide. Senior FDE leaders develop a combination of technical depth, team leadership, customer instinct, and product influence that is genuinely rare.
- Real traction, strong backing. 50+ enterprise clients, ₹85 Crores in Series A, and a founding team that has built and exited in this space before. The hard part of proving the product works is behind us. The challenge ahead is scaling delivery without losing quality - and that's exactly what this role is for.
We're committed to creating a fair, respectful, and inclusive workplace. From hiring to growth opportunities, our decisions are based on merit, skills, and potential, never on gender, identity, background, or any other personal characteristic. Talent has no labels here, and everyone is welcome to grow and thrive with us.
