Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Join us on this thrilling journey to revolutionize the workforce with AI.

The future of work is here, and it's at Cresta.

About the role:

At Cresta, shipping AI is only half the story. Deploying it successfully is where the real impact happens.

As Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, you'll lead the team that turns cutting-edge AI into real-world customer success. You'll build, mentor, and scale a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who work directly with customers to deliver AI agents that solve practical business problems and drive measurable outcomes.

This is a high-impact leadership role for someone who loves building teams, refining processes, and driving product excellence through deep customer engagement. You'll be at the intersection of engineering, product, and go-to-market , ensuring that Cresta delivers exceptional value at scale.

Travel Expectations:

10-25% travel for customer visits, team offsites, and company events

This role is perfect for someone who:

• Has been in the trenches as an FDE or similar customer-facing engineering role and wants to scale that impact through leadership
• Thrives on building high-performing teams and developing talent
• Loves turning customer insights into product improvements
• Gets energized by complex deployments, ambiguous problems, and fast-paced environments
• Believes that engineering excellence and customer obsession go hand-in-hand

Why You'll Love This Role:

• High impact, high visibility: You'll own one of the most strategic functions at Cresta , the team that turns AI into customer success
• Build something new: FDE at Cresta is still being defined. You'll shape the function, the culture, and the playbook
• Work with cutting-edge AI: You'll be hands-on with state-of-the-art AI agents, LLMs, and enterprise deployments at scale
• Develop world-class talent: You'll recruit and mentor some of the best engineers in the industry
• Influence product strategy: Your insights will directly shape what Cresta builds and how we win in enterprise
• Collaborate with the best: You'll work alongside world-class teams across product, engineering, and go-to-market
• Move fast, see impact: This isn't a slow-moving enterprise role. You'll ship fast, iterate, and see your work drive measurable customer outcomes

What You'll Do:

• Build and Scale the FDE Team
• Recruit top talent: Own hiring strategy and execution for FDEs, building a diverse team of engineers who blend technical excellence with customer empathy
• Develop your team: Mentor FDEs through hands-on coaching, career development, and technical guidance
• Define the role: Evolve the FDE career ladder, competencies, and growth paths as the function matures
• Foster culture: Build a team culture grounded in ownership, customer-first mentality, and continuous learning

• Refine Processes and Drive Operational Excellence
• Optimize the customer lifecycle: Design and refine how FDEs engage across sales, implementation, and long-tail support
• Scale what works: Identify patterns in successful deployments and turn them into repeatable processes
• Balance speed and quality: Establish frameworks for scoping, prioritization, and delivery that enable FDEs to move fast without sacrificing quality
• Measure what matters: Define team metrics and KPIs tied to customer outcomes, deployment velocity, and product adoption

• Drive Product Improvements
• Be the voice of the customer: Synthesize customer feedback, pain points, and feature requests to inform product roadmap priorities
• Close the feedback loop: Partner closely with Product and Engineering teams to advocate for improvements that unlock enterprise value
• Build vs. buy vs. hack: Guide FDEs in making smart trade-offs between quick fixes, generalizable features, and platform investments
• Champion generalization: Push the team to build scalable solutions, not one-off customizations, while still delivering customer value quickly

• Lead Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product: Work with PMs to translate customer insights into product strategy and roadmap decisions
• Align with Engineering: Collaborate with core engineering teams to ensure FDE-built features integrate seamlessly into the platform
• Enable Go-to-Market: Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success to scope opportunities, manage expectations, and deliver successful outcomes
• Influence leadership: Present customer insights, deployment learnings, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership

• Stay Hands-On (When Needed)
• Jump into the fire: Roll up your sleeves to support critical deployments, troubleshoot complex issues, or unblock your team
• Stay technical: Maintain credibility by staying close to the codebase, understanding AI agent architecture, and contributing when it matters most
• Lead by example: Model the behaviors you want to see , customer empathy, technical depth, ownership, and urgency

What We're Looking For:

• Engineering management experience: At least 2 years managing, mentoring, and growing engineering teams
• Customer-facing engineering background: Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Implementation Engineer, or similar role working directly with customers
• Technical depth: Strong software engineering fundamentals (coding, system design, APIs, databases) , you've built production systems and can earn the respect of senior engineers
• AI/LLM familiarity: Hands-on experience with AI agents, LLMs, prompt engineering, or ML deployments in production
• Hiring and talent development: Proven track record of recruiting, onboarding, and developing high-performing engineers
• Cross-functional leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence and collaborate across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success teams
• Bias toward action: You ship fast, iterate, and believe that perfect is the enemy of good
• Customer empathy: Deep understanding of enterprise customer needs and pain points