Engineering Manager, FDE + PubSec

Engineering Manager, FDE + PubSec About Ditto: Ditto is redefining how data moves at the edge. Our mission is to make it seamless for developers to build resilient, real-time applications, regardless of network conditions. Whether you're in a stadium, airplane, or remote military base, Ditto's peer-to-peer sync engine ensures devices stay connected and data stays consistent, even without internet. With more than $145 million in funding and trusted by organizations like Chick-fil-A, Delta Airlines, and the U.S. military, Ditto powers mission-critical experiences across aviation, retail, travel, hospitality, defense, and more. As a globally distributed, fast-growing startup, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that reflects the wide range of perspectives needed to solve the world’s hardest connectivity problems. The Role We're looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) team and drive technical excellence across our Public Sector accounts. This is a high-impact, customer-facing leadership role at the intersection of deep technical work and enterprise delivery. Your team of FDEs is embedded with our most strategic customers — solving hard integration problems, building proof-of-concepts, accelerating adoption, and acting as the technical voice of the customer back into Ditto's product and engineering org. In this role, you'll be both a people leader and a technical partner, helping your team thrive while ensuring Ditto delivers exceptional outcomes in complex PubSec environments. What You'll Do - Lead, grow, and retain a team of Forward Deployed Engineers supporting enterprise and public sector customers - Set the bar for technical quality and customer engagement across the FDE practice - Partner closely with Sales, Customer Success, and Product to align engineering capacity with strategic account priorities - Provide hands-on technical guidance on Ditto integrations, edge deployments, and architecture — particularly in air-gapped, disconnected, and classified environments - Own the team's delivery execution: scoping engagements, managing workloads, removing blockers, and ensuring customers hit their milestones - Drive hiring, onboarding, and career development for FDE team members - Establish scalable processes, playbooks, and tooling to improve how the team works across a growing customer base - Represent technical requirements of PubSec customers internally, influencing roadmap and product decisions - Navigate the nuances of government procurement, compliance requirements (FedRAMP, IL4/IL5, CMMC), and security-conscious customer environments What We're Looking For - 3–6+ years of engineering management experience, ideally with a field or customer-facing engineering team - Strong software engineering background — you can read code, engage on architecture, and earn the trust of senior ICs - Experience working with or within the Public Sector, Defense, or Federal markets; familiarity with ITAR, FedRAMP, or DoD environments is a strong plus - Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent customer engagements with competing priorities - Excellent communication skills — you can translate between business needs and engineering constraints, for both technical and non-technical audiences - Track record of building and developing high-performing teams - Comfort operating in ambiguity; Ditto moves fast and this role requires judgment as much as process - Ability to obtain a US security clearance (or active clearance) is preferred Nice to Have - Experience with peer-to-peer sync, edge computing, or offline-first architectures - Background in mobile, embedded, or IoT systems - Prior FDE, solutions engineering, or professional services leadership experience THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING WITH US We offer competitive salaries and meaningful equity. We believe everyone on the team should have a stake in what we’re building. Benefits vary by region to m ... (truncated, view full listing at source)