# Forward Deployed Engineering Manager **Company**: Cresta **Location**: United States (Remote) **Work arrangement**: remote **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cresta/jobs/5099068008 **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_5409d86b-253 ## Description 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 ## Skills ### Required - AI - Machine Learning - Software Engineering - Leadership - Team Management - Customer Engagement - Product Development - Cross-Functional Collaboration