Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
Cursor · San Francisco, CA · 3 wk ago
EngineeringFull-time
About the role
The Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering leads and helps scale a team that embeds directly with customer engineering teams, building production-grade Cursor workflows, and transferring habits and culture that compound long after the engagement ends. Success is measured by what’s different at day 30, not what gets shipped.
Responsibilities
- Sell Own the full arc from technical discovery to executive close — partnering with Sales and Account teams to qualify opportunities, leading architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints, and scoping engagements with enough precision to de-risk delivery before a line of code is written
- Build and present proposals that translate ambiguous customer problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROIs
- Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it
- Drive deal strategy on strategic accounts; your technical credibility is a direct lever on close rates for six- and seven-figure engagements
- Deliver Serve as executive technical sponsor on your region's highest-priority engagements and manage stakeholder relationships from IC engineers to C-suite
- Ensure delivery quality across your team's projects: appropriate scoping, milestone tracking, technical standards, and clean handoffs to customer engineering teams
- Translate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions
- Identify and escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions
- Manage active engagements: escalate on complex builds, coach FDEs on scoping and delivery decisions, and step in directly on accounts where the stakes are highest
- Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time
- Manage People Lead, develop, and scale a team of 6–8 Forward Deployed Engineers working strategic FDE projects
- Hire top-tier FDE talent; set clear expectations, technical performance standards, and career growth paths for a team where "excellent" means actually shipping in production
- Coach FDEs through the hardest problems in the field — scoping under deal pressure, building alongside senior technical stakeholders, and knowing when to protect scope vs. when to flex
- Build and scale the partner FDE track — train, enable, and hold the quality bar for GSI and consulting partners who carry the FDE motion forward at volume
Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience leading technical teams that build and ship in production — Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or a similar function where writing and reviewing code is part of the job
- Experience with software development and coding in Python, Javascript/Typescript
- Built and owned AI-native workflows in production, not just prototypes, and have debugged real-world model failures
- Can diagnose a complex enterprise engineering environment quickly, identify the highest-leverage intervention, and scope a meaningful engagement
- Built and scaled IC-level technical teams and know what excellence looks like in the field: sharp scoping, clean delivery, and knowledge that stays at the customer long after the engagement closes
Skills
- Deep technical credibility
- Strong people management skills
- Judgment to keep engagements scoped tight, delivered fast, and worth repeating
Benefits
- Flat organizational structure
- Talent-dense team
- Emphasis on truth-seeking, passion, and creativity
- Enjoyment of spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code
Pay
N/A
Schedule
N/A
Benefits
N/A