Senior Engagement Manager

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end customer engagements, including kickoff, planning, governance, execution, and delivery.
• Partner with customer executives and technical teams to understand priorities, identify critical pain points, and focus delivery on the highest-value outcomes.
• Translate customer goals into clear workstreams, milestones, timelines, and deliverables, and keep both customer and internal teams aligned against them.
• Drive prioritization decisions with customers to ensure near-term deliverables create meaningful business value while supporting longer-term strategic goals.
• Coordinate internal cross-functional resources across product, engineering, machine learning, and go-to-market teams to keep work organized, dependencies managed, and blockers removed.
• Establish strong stakeholder communication cadences, including regular status updates, steering committee discussions, executive readouts, and risk/escalation management.
• Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders on the customer side, including technical leaders, business sponsors, and executive decision-makers.
• Partner with top-tier machine learning, product, engineering, and business teams across industries to design and refine AI and data applications that drive measurable business value.
• Oversee project delivery to ensure high-quality outputs, strong follow-through, and clear accountability across all parties.
• Present progress, recommendations, and results to audiences ranging from engineers to C-suite executives.
• Safeguard long-term customer relationships by proactively identifying risks, navigating trade-offs, and addressing concerns before they become blockers.
• Establish effective feedback loops between customers and Shakudo’s product, engineering, and go-to-market teams.
• Develop and improve repeatable engagement processes, playbooks, and operating rhythms that help Shakudo scale customer delivery effectively.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in management consulting, customer engagement, program management, or similar customer-facing delivery roles.
• Strong project and program management skills, including scoping, planning, prioritization, dependency management, and risk mitigation.
• Strong leadership, communication, and presentation skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels, including senior customer executives.
• 2+ years of direct technical experience or close collaboration with engineering teams on technical projects.
• Deep understanding of data and AI technologies and their applications in enterprise contexts.
• Proven ability to create structure in fast-paced, ambiguous, and unstructured environments.
• Executive presence and sound judgment in managing customer relationships, expectations, and escalations.
• Adaptive, curious, and collaborative, willing to learn, lead, guide, and follow as needed.

A Plus

• Experience with programming, scripting, or statistical packages (e.g. Python, R, Matlab, SQL)
• Experience working with enterprise customers in regulated or security-conscious environments
• Experience building operating cadences, governance processes, or PMO-style structures for complex technical engagements