Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Responsibilities

• Own delivery outcomes across a portfolio of strategic accounts, from signed SOW through production go-live and into expansion, coordinating Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), Forward Deployed Team Leads (FDTLs), Presales, and customer stakeholders against a single delivery plan per engagement.
• Set the technical and commercial roadmap for each engagement in your portfolio, run the relationship at the C-suite level, and build, staff, and develop the team of engineers executing against that roadmap.
• Operate at the executive table with the customer, go deep enough technically to catch a bad scope or a wrong estimate before it becomes a delivery risk, and build a team capable of delivering without you in the room.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in management consulting or FDE/delivery leadership, with meaningful time in enterprise software, professional services, or technical consulting; consulting leadership experience at the Associate Partner/Principal level (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or equivalent) is strongly preferred.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Prior people management experience — hiring, developing, and performance-managing a team, not just leading a workstream.
• A track record owning complex, multi-workstream delivery for Fortune 500 or large public-sector clients across multiple simultaneous engagements, with direct accountability for outcomes, not just process.
• Direct experience with AI agent deployment, LLM-based systems, or enterprise AI platforms in production, with enough technical fluency to understand data architecture, integration patterns, and agentic system concepts well enough to scope work and evaluate trade-offs.
• Comfortable enough with code to read a pull request, leverage agentic tools to write code, or follow a technical design doc without translation.
• Executive presence: comfortable running C-suite briefings, navigating enterprise politics, and holding firm on scope and priorities under pressure from a sponsor.
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity, including managing a team through it.
• Demonstrated ability to build trust with both a customer's business stakeholders and their technical teams simultaneously, and to build that same trust with a team you manage.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a key industry vertical such as advanced manufacturing, energy, heavy industrial, CPG, agriculture, defense, or public sector.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed, embedded delivery model at another enterprise software or AI platform vendor with a professional-services or forward-deployed motion.
• Experience building or scaling a delivery function or team, not just operating within one.

Benefits

C3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan.