Forward Deployed Strategist
Cursor · San Francisco, CA · 1 wk ago
Business DevelopmentFull-time
About the role
The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.
Responsibilities
- Scope Partner with customer executive sponsors to scope FDE projects — translating ambiguous business problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROI
- Lead technical discovery and architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints to validate that every engagement is technically feasible
- Deliver Work side by side with the FDE on the technical build — you own the configuration layer including workflows, settings, integrations, and platform tooling that don't require heavy custom code while the FDE owns the deeper production builds
- Own technical enablement and adoption: run hands-on training, build playbooks and reference workflows, and coach the customer's team until they're self-sufficient. Adoption is measured by what their users do without you in the room
- Monitor technical feasibility throughout delivery, adjusting scope with the sponsor when constraints emerge rather than letting engagements drift
- Identify and scope expansion opportunities as they surface during delivery, in partnership with the account team
- Escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions
- Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time
- Own the executive relationship Establish and maintain the executive relationship on your engagements, serving as the primary point of contact from kickoff through handoff
- Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it
- Translate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions — for the sponsor and for the build team
Qualifications
- You've spent 6+ years in Solutions Architecture, Deployment Strategy, technical consulting, or an Engagement Manager seat where you owned scoping and delivery with a technical team in AI-production workflows
- You understand agentic coding and LLMs well enough to hold your own with senior eng: how they behave in production, where they fail, and what a resilient workflow looks like (you don't need to be the person writing the production code)
- You're comfortable hands-on with Cursor workflows, integrations, and platform config, and can read enough Python / JS-TS to partner with an FDE
- You've shipped AI-native workflows past the prototype stage and can tell a real production constraint from a nice-to-have
- You can walk into an unfamiliar enterprise eng org, find the highest-leverage intervention fast, and scope something that delivers concrete value in weeks, not quarters
- You have the executive presence to own the C-suite relationship and the technical credibility to earn trust with their eng leads
- Domain depth in FSI, insurance, telecom, high-tech, healthcare/life sciences, or semiconductor is a strong plus