Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

About Nexus

NexusOne is the converged data platform for the AI era. Composable by design, built on an open-source foundation, and AI-native from the ground up. NexusOne offers a unified engine for enterprises, bringing their existing stacks along while giving AI agents full context across the estate.

Role Summary

This role is the delivery and technical operations owner for a portfolio of NexusOne's strategic accounts. You own the account, delivery, and gross margin for a portfolio of 2–4 strategic accounts, each with $5–10M in delivery/managed services revenue. You manage the P&L for these accounts, driving against deliverables AND against gross margin; you surface risk on both before it's a number on the dashboard. You also own the customer-side executive relationship, ensuring the VP of Data/CDO/CTO treats you as a peer, not a vendor. You partner with the CRO on renewal and expansion strategy, shaping the conditions under which the customer grows.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years in a customer-facing solution delivery, consulting, or forward-deployed role
• Operationally rigorous. Strong track record of delivering against customer needs — not activity-shaped ("I ran the program") but outcome-shaped ("the customer got X and here's specifically how I made it land")
• Has personally owned a customer's outcome end-to-end at an enterprise account — not just "contributed to" or "supported"
• Communicates with precision across levels. Same person can hold the engineer's whiteboard conversation, the VP-level steering committee, and the C-suite QBR without changing who they are — only the register
• Bidirectional translator. Has owned the act of translating customer requirements into something the engineering org can actually build, and engineering trade-offs into something the customer's exec team can actually decide on
• Problem ownership mindset. Reflex when something breaks is to own it until it's not, regardless of whose "job" it is
• Consulting EM intrinsics paired with founding mindset. Carries the structural muscle of a top-tier consulting engagement manager (McKinsey / BCG / Bain / Palantir lineage — client management, structured thinking, exec presence, written clarity) and the entrepreneurial streak of a founder — builds the playbook rather than follows one
• Has worked inside a startup or scale-up engineering organization (Series A through D) — knows what it looks like to operate when the org chart is still being drawn
• Fluent enough technically to read an architecture doc, ask the right questions, and not need a translator in an engineering room. Data, cloud, or platform infrastructure background strongly preferred
• Runs modern program tooling — Linear and Notion specifically, or has switched to them from Jira/Asana/Confluence and can articulate why
• Strong written communication. Status updates that move decisions. Postmortems people read. Memos that change minds
• High agency. Will close their own loops, will not wait for someone else to define the playbook, will push back constructively when the company is wrong
• Strong differentiators: Has worked at Palantir (FDE), Anthropic / OpenAI (FDE / Solutions), Databricks (Field Eng / CE), Stripe (Implementation / Solutions), Ramp / Mercury (Solutions), Scale AI (FDE), or a comparable forward-deployed environment
• Carried direct gross margin or P&L responsibility on accounts — not just hit milestones
• Engineering background somewhere in their history (CS degree, eng IC role, or a credible technical foundation built on the job)