Director, Deployed Engineering - Central
$340k+Application analysis
Director, Deployed Engineering - Central at LangChain is a forward deployed llm tooling role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Technical Leadership role centers on team leadership, customer program ownership, and scaling delivery playbooks. Key signals from the listing: Python, Senior scope.
About LangChain
LangChain builds frameworks and products for production LLM applications with a deeply technical user base. The role is anchored in Chicago, IL, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Director, Deployed Engineering - Central
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Director, Deployed Engineering - Central to a specific customer or deployment you owned — LangChain hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Quantify team and program scale: people managed, number of concurrent customer deployments, and revenue or mission outcomes influenced.
- Explain how you built repeatable playbooks so delivery quality did not depend on one hero engineer.
- The posting mentions multiple languages — pick the one most relevant to this team and show production code, not tutorial exercises.
- This role is tied to Chicago, IL — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
- Compensation is in a senior band — emphasize staff-level scope: cross-team influence, architecture decisions, and customer exec communication.
Stand out at LangChain
- Demonstrate LLM app architecture with a concrete example — LangChain will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate open-source community fluency with a concrete example — LangChain will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Contributions to LangChain/LangGraph or a public agent project is high-signal here.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on langchain.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
About Us
At LangChain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open-source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale. With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. LangChain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world. Today, our platform includes LangSmith (Observability, Evaluation, Deployment, Fleet, and Sandboxes), our open source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, and Deep Agents), and the newly launched LangSmith Engine for autonomous agent improvement. We have 100M+ monthly open source downloads, 6,000+ active LangSmith customers, and 5 of the Fortune 10 use LangSmith in production (+ 35% of the Fortune 500 overall), including teams at Klarna, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, LinkedIn, Monday.com, Nvidia, and Bridgewater.
About The Team
The Deployed Engineering team works directly with companies building and running AI agents in production, helping turn ideas and prototypes into systems teams can rely on. This is a hands-on, highly technical team that partners closely with customer engineers across the full lifecycle, from pre-sales evaluations to post-deployment advisory work. The focus is on achieving the technical win, co-designing agent architectures, and helping customers operate agents reliably at scale using the LangChain suite. Deployed Engineers sit at the intersection of engineering, product, and go-to-market, shaping how LangChain is adopted in the field and feeding real-world insights back into the platform. We’re looking for a leader to build and scale our Deployed Engineering organization across the Central US region.
About The Role
As our Director, Deployed Engineering - Central, you will build and lead the team of deployed engineers working across the region. You will build and lead a team of deployed engineers who establish LangChain’s technical and strategic credibility with our most important customers. You will report to the Global Head of Deployed Engineering, and operate as a peer to the regional sales leader, with shared ownership of outcomes. This role is equal parts organizational leadership, customer engagement, and revenue accountability. You will define how deployed engineering operates in our East region, build a high-performing regional team, and ensure tight alignment between technical excellence and commercial success. As a member of the global deployed engineering leadership team, you will also be a core contributor to shared strategy, helping define the playbooks, processes, and standards used across regions.
What You’ll Do
- Build and scale the deployed engineering team, owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management as the team grows rapidly.
- Achieve the technical win, driving urgency and focus with our customers, in order to rapidly advance our opportunities across the region.
- Partner with LangChain’s regional sales leader, with shared accountability for revenue outcomes and customer success.
- Lead technical strategy on our most strategic enterprise opportunities, engaging directly with senior technical and business stakeholders to shape evaluations, architecture, and solution design.
- Differentiate LangChain in competitive environments, clearly articulating our technical advantages, product vision, and unique expertise in building and deploying agents in production.
- Set and uphold the technical bar for deployed engineering, staying close to the product and modeling what excellent customer-facing engineering looks like.
- Co-create global playbooks and operating practices, contributing regional insights while maintaining strong global consistency.
- Develop future leaders, building a strong bench of deployed engineers and managers.
What We’re Looking For
- 10 years of experience in sales engineering, solutions architecture, engineering, or similar customer-facing technical roles at a dev tools, AI, or infrastructure company.
- Proven experience leading and scaling technical GTM teams.
- Deep technical expertise — you’re not a stranger to Python, and are well-versed in software engineering, platform engineering, and solutions architecture disciplines.
- Experience working with or selling to developers and engineering-led buyers.
- Strong track record of leading complex enterprise technical engagements and building trust with senior stakeholders.
- Exceptional communication and technical storytelling skills, with the ability to simplify complex concepts and influence executive audiences.
- A bias for action, comfort with ambiguity, and a consistently high bar for excellence.
Bonus If You Have
- Familiarity with genAI, agents, observability, or open source software
- Experience as an early member of a startup GTM organization
Compensation
Annual OTE range: $270k - $340k
Compensation Philosophy:
We offer competitive compensation that includes base salary, variable compensation for relevant roles, meaningful equity, benefits, and perks. Actual compensation and offerings will vary based on role, level, and location. Team members in the EU, UK, and APAC receive locally competitive benefits aligned with regional norms and regulations.
Benefits
Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, meals on in-office days in the US and more.