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.
• Own escalation management across your portfolio; when an engagement is at risk, you are the first call and the person who drives it back to green.

People management and team leadership

• Manage a team of Forward Deployed resources across your portfolio, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Allocate staffing across accounts based on account priority, risk, and growth stage, and reallocate quickly when an engagement's needs change.
• Own headcount planning for your portfolio: build the case for new roles, identify underperformance early, and manage out where needed.
• Create a bench strong enough that losing any single person does not put an account at risk.

Technical fluency and scoping

• Lead or oversee technical discovery across your portfolio, mapping customer workflows, identifying data and integration constraints, and defining MVP scope for new use cases.
• Translate customer business objectives into sequenced technical roadmaps that FDEs and FDTLs execute against.
• Hold architecture conversations with customer and internal engineering stakeholders credibly enough to evaluate trade-offs and catch scope or feasibility problems before they become delivery risk.
• Use case adoption and expansion
• Identify the highest-value use cases across your portfolio and build the business case for each, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and ROI measurement.
• Drive pilot-to-production conversion by removing organizational and technical blockers that stall adoption after a use case proves out technically.
• Build the executive relationships that surface the next use case before the customer asks for it, turning single-workflow engagements into multi-year account growth.
• Partner with Sales and Presales to shape expansion opportunities using direct field insight into where customer problems and appetite sit.

Playbooks and organizational contribution

• Codify what works across your portfolio into reusable patterns — scoping templates, value measurement frameworks, staffing models, and stakeholder playbooks — that other Directors and FDTLs can use.
• Feed field signal back into Product and Solutions on where the platform and base applications fall short of what customers actually need.

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.