Services Engagement Manager

About the role

The Services Engagement Manager (SEM) is the single accountable owner of scoped, time-bound professional services engagements — from the moment they’re shaped in the sales cycle, through delivery, formal acceptance, and clean financial closure. The role protects two things at once: our customers' outcomes and our delivery integrity.

What You’ll Do

• Shape and scope engagements with Sales.
• Translate customer requirements into a defensible Statement of Work — scope boundaries, assumptions, deliverables, acceptance criteria, effort estimates, and milestone/payment structure.
• Guard scope integrity before signature.
• Validate that what Sales is proposing can be delivered at target margin, identify what's out of scope, and propose a change order before an engagement is signed.
• Own the engagement end to end.
• Drive the engagement plan, cadence, and milestone tracking from kickoff through delivery.
• Orchestrate delivery resources.
• Sequence and prioritize Forward Deployed Engineers, detection engineering, subject-matter experts, and third-party partners against the plan.
• Manage scope and margin in flight.
• Actively manage scope against the SOW, raise change orders for additions rather than absorbing silent creep, and run the engagement P&L — tracking burn against estimate and flagging overruns early.
• Drive to acceptance and clean closure.
• Secure formal customer sign-off against defined acceptance criteria and execute clean financial closure, including final milestone completion, invoicing readiness, and revenue-recognition support.
• Hand off and improve the catalog.
• Run a structured handoff to the Customer Success Manager for any steady-state relationship, and feed reusable scope and estimate patterns back into the services catalog.

What You Bring

• Professional-services delivery or consulting experience in cybersecurity or enterprise software, with a track record of personally authoring SOWs, estimating effort, and owning a margin or utilization number.
• Strong scoping and effort-estimation skills, SOW authoring, and change-order discipline.
• Project and delivery management strength, including engagement P&L and margin management.
• Executive stakeholder management — credible in front of a CISO — plus enough SecOps / detection-engineering fluency to scope engagements and serve as a real check on what's being sold.
• Comfortable being measured on delivery and margin outcomes over relationship longevity, with a bias toward closure and the ability to hold the scope line firmly and diplomatically.

Bonus Points

• A delivery or project-management background paired with genuine technical depth.
• Experience working with partners on jointly owned engagements.
• Background in a high-growth startup or MDR / security-services environment.

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Relevant certifications such as PMP, ITIL, Security+, or CISSP are a plus.