Forward Deployed Engineering Leader

About the role

Cohesity is hiring a Director to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. This team owns the last mile of technical delivery for our most complex and highest-value customers, ensuring Cohesity's platform capabilities translate into production outcomes and measurable business value.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Scale
  • Lead, develop, and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers at the Individual Contributor level (IC5) across Tier 1 and Tier 2 account coverage
  • Establish team operating rhythm, performance standards, and career development frameworks
  • Evolve FDE operating models, engagement playbooks, tooling, and documentation to support scale
  • Manage a globally distributed team (70% India / 30% US) with consistent standards and an inclusive culture
• Customer Outcomes & Account Ownership
  • Own post-sale technical delivery for Cohesity's Top 300 accounts — from complex deployments and Proof of Concept (POC)-to-production conversions to ongoing optimization
  • Act as the senior technical escalation point for Tier 1 engagements; partner with Customer Success Managers (CSMs), Sales Engineers (SEs), and Strategic Technical Assistance Team (STAT)
  • Drive time-to-production, deployment success rates, and POC conversion outcomes
  • Ensure FDE engagement translates into measurable adoption, utilization, and renewal signals — grounded in customer outcomes, not activity metrics
  • Represent the customer perspective internally by translating deployment friction and adoption blockers into actionable product feedback
• Technical Execution & Problem Solving
  • Lead structured root cause analysis on deployment failures, misconfigurations, and adoption stalls; convert findings into reusable playbooks
  • Assess customer infrastructure environments and prescribe Cohesity deployment patterns optimized for performance, resilience, and long-term manageability
  • Identify and address both technical and organizational blockers impacting customer outcomes
  • Drive accountability for reducing time-to-unblock across critical Tier 1 engagements
• Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) & Revenue Impact
  • Influence Gross Revenue Retention by removing technical barriers that lead to churn in strategic accounts
  • Partner with Customer Success (CS) and Finance to track FDE-driven retention and expansion impact
  • Equip CSMs and renewal teams with proof-of-value artifacts, usage insights, and technical Return on Investment (ROI) narratives

Qualifications

• 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles (solutions engineering, FDE, professional services, or technical account management)
• 5+ years leading teams of senior engineers or technical specialists
• Proven ownership of complex, enterprise-scale deployments in production environments
• Deep familiarity with data protection, storage, cloud, or security platforms (e.g., Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam, NetApp)
• Demonstrated ability to influence GRR through technical delivery, with measurable impact
• Strong track record diagnosing and resolving complex, multi-system failures in production environments
• Experience leading distributed, global teams
• Experienced in acting as a trusted advisor to enterprise IT and security leaders (CISOs, VPs, Directors)
• Familiarity with modern cloud and AI infrastructure (Kubernetes, hybrid cloud, object storage, unstructured data systems)
• Ability to translate technical deployment status into business risk for executive stakeholders
• Highly effective at driving alignment without direct authority
• Builder with scale mindset — able to create clarity, structure, and consistency in evolving environments
• Outcome-oriented — focuses on production impact vs. activity
• Strong executive presence — comfortable engaging C-level leaders internally and externally
• Deep field empathy — understands enterprise sales cycles and customer realities

Skills

• Customer-first mindset — defines success by customer outcomes and business impact
• Structured problem solver — applies repeatable approaches to complex failures
• Builder with scale mindset — able to create clarity, structure, and consistency in evolving environments
• Outcome-oriented — focuses on production impact vs. activity
• Strong executive presence — comfortable engaging C-level leaders internally and externally
• Deep field empathy — understands enterprise sales cycles and customer realities

Benefits

Join us on our mission to shape the future of our industry. Cohesity is a leader in AI-powered data security and management. We make it easy to secure, protect, manage, and get value from data — across the data center, edge, and cloud. Our innovative platform and solutions protect organizations against cybersecurity threats and help them recover from attacks, while enabling next-generation AI workloads. With Cohesity, organizations can move faster, without worrying about their most critical asset: data.

Pay

$229,600.00 - $287,000.00 per year (based on an annualized hourly rate assuming normal full-time employment)

Schedule

Cohesity employees who are within a reasonable commute (e.g. within a forty-five (45) minute average travel time) work out of our core offices 2-3 days a week of their choosing.