Manager, Forward Deployed Engineer

Introduction

We are seeking an experienced and dynamic Forward Deployed Engineer Manager to lead, mentor, and grow a team of highly skilled Forward Deployed Engineers. This role requires a blend of strong technical leadership, strategic thinking, and hands-on customer engagement (approximately 25% of time) to ensure the successful deployment and adoption of Optimizely's innovative AI products within our enterprise customer base. You will be instrumental in shaping team processes, fostering technical excellence, and driving customer success through cutting-edge AI solutions.

Job Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development:
• Lead & Mentor: Recruit, hire, onboard, and continuously develop a high-performing team of Forward Deployed Engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Performance Management: Set clear performance expectations, conduct regular 1:1s, provide constructive feedback, and manage performance reviews to support individual and team growth.
• Strategic Planning: Collaborate with leadership to define team goals, roadmap, and priorities, ensuring alignment with overall company objectives and customer needs.
• Process Improvement: Develop, implement, and refine best practices, methodologies, and tools for efficient and scalable AI solution deployment, integration, and ongoing support.
• Resource Allocation: Effectively manage team capacity and allocate resources to customer projects, ensuring timely delivery and high-quality outcomes.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Serve as a key liaison between the FDE team and Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success teams, advocating for customer needs and influencing product development.
• Technical Guidance: Provide architectural oversight, technical guidance, and escalation support for complex customer challenges, ensuring the team delivers robust and effective solutions.

Customer Engagement & Technical Expertise:
• Strategic Customer Consultation: Engage directly with key enterprise customers on high-impact or complex AI initiatives, acting as a trusted technical advisor and an escalation point for the team.
• Solution Design & Oversight: Participate in the design and validation of intricate AI solutions, ensuring they align with customer objectives and Optimizely's product capabilities.
• Complex Deployments: Oversee or directly contribute to the most challenging technical deployments, leveraging deep expertise in Optimizely AI (Opal) and customer tech stacks.
• Advanced Troubleshooting: Lead or assist in diagnosing and resolving critical technical issues, ensuring the stability and optimal performance of deployed AI solutions.
• Best Practices & Advocacy: Champion AI deployment best practices internally and externally, representing Optimizely as a thought leader in the field.

Knowledge and Experience

· Experience: 6+ years in a customer-facing technical role (e.g., Solutions Architect, Implementation Engineer, Solutions Consultant, FDE), with at least 2+ years in a leadership or management capacity, focusing on solutions deployment and integration.

· Team Leadership: Proven experience in building, leading, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams.

· Strategic Thinking: Ability to translate business objectives into technical strategies and actionable plans for the team.

· Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Strong understanding and practical experience with RAG architectures and building custom tools/applications for RAG workflows (e.g. embedding services, prompt engineering).

· Prompting Proficiency: Strong prompting skills and a deep understanding of best practices for optimizing AI model output.

· Programming Proficiency: Good programming skills in JavaScript, TypeScript or Python for building integration layers, applications, and automation scripts via APIs.

· API & System Interaction: Expertise in interacting with and designing solutions around external systems via public APIs, including complex data flows and authentication.

· Business Acumen: Strong experience in analyzing complex business requirements, translating them into technical solutions, and understanding their impact on business outcomes.

· Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills for diagnosing, architecting solutions for, and resolving highly complex technical issues.

· Communication: Great verbal and written communication skills to articulate complex technical and strategic concepts to diverse audiences, including executive stakeholders.

· Customer Focus: A strong customer-centric mindset, with a proven ability to build strategic relationships and drive significant customer success.

· Adaptability: Ability to quickly adapt to new technologies, product updates, and diverse customer environments, while guiding a team through change.

· Travel: Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed (up to 10%).

Preferred Skills:

· Data Integration: Proficiency in data integration, transformation (ETL), data governance techniques, and data pipeline design for AI solution consumption.

· AI Deployment Expertise: Deep practical experience deploying, integrating, and optimizing AI solutions in complex enterprise environments, including understanding data flow and system integration.

· Consulting Experience: Significant experience in customer-facing engineering, solutions consulting, or technical pre-sales roles.

· Project/Program Management: Familiarity with project management methodologies and tools to oversee multiple concurrent customer engagements.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.

Competencies