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 engagement structure across your portfolio — scope, milestones, dependencies, and value hypotheses — and hold the line on scope discipline as customer priorities shift.
• Run executive briefings and steering committee updates across accounts, translating delivery status and technical trade-offs into language a C-suite sponsor acts on.
• 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.
• 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.
• Set the technical and delivery bar for your team, and coach FDTLs and FDEs on how to run their own accounts with the same rigor you apply to yours.
• 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.
• 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.
• Get hands-on when it matters — pressure-test a data model, sketch an integration approach, or validate a data assumption yourself when it's faster than waiting on someone else.
• 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.
• 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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

C3 AI is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristics, including disabled and veteran status.