This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines deep technical credibility, strong people management, and the judgment to keep engagements scoped tight, delivered fast, and worth repeating
Sell
Own the full arc from technical discovery to executive close — partnering with Sales and Account teams to qualify opportunities, leading architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints, and scoping engagements with enough precision to de-risk delivery before a line of code is written
Build and present proposals that translate ambiguous customer problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROI
Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it
Drive deal strategy on strategic accounts; your technical credibility is a direct lever on close rates for six- and seven-figure engagements
Serve as executive technical sponsor on your region's highest-priority engagements and manage stakeholder relationships from IC engineers to C-suite
Ensure delivery quality across your team's projects: appropriate scoping, milestone tracking, technical standards, and clean handoffs to customer engineering teamsTranslate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions
Identify and escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions
Manage active engagements: escalate on complex builds, coach FDEs on scoping and delivery decisions, and step in directly on accounts where the stakes are highest
Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time
Lead, develop, and scale a team of 6–8 Forward Deployed Engineers working strategic FDE projects
Hire top-tier FDE talent; set clear expectations, technical performance standards, and career growth paths for a team where "excellent" means actually shipping in production
Coach FDEs through the hardest problems in the field — scoping under deal pressure, building alongside senior technical stakeholders, and knowing when to protect scope vs. when to flex
Build and scale the partner FDE track — train, enable, and hold the quality bar for GSI and consulting partners who carry the FDE motion forward at volume