Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

The impact you will have

• Oversee regional performance targets, including billable utilisation, team growth, and hiring, while championing delivery excellence and customer success across the FDE portfolio.
• Partner with Account Executives, Engagement Managers, and Field Engineering leaders to position, scope, and deliver transformational Professional Services (PS) programs spanning data migrations, AI/ML platforms, and advanced analytics.
• Establish best practices for project oversight, risk management, and quality standards that scale with a growing FDE practice, ensuring projects are delivered on time and to specification.
• Synthesise field insights from your team’s engagements to provide direct feedback to Engineering and Product management, helping to guide the Databricks roadmap while driving the creation of reusable customer accelerators and frameworks.
• Serve as the critical escalation point for high-stakes customer situations, leveraging deep technical credibility and leadership judgment to protect strategic relationships and drive rapid resolution.
• Mentor Forward Deployed Engineers through structured career pathways, technical coaching, and a culture of innovation, mastery, and continuous growth.

Key requirements

• 4+ years leading high-performing technical delivery teams, with a proven track record building excellence-driven cultures
• 5+ years as a technical solutions architect or data/AI engineer, providing coaching credibility
• Familiarity with Databricks, Apache Spark™, MLflow, Delta Lake, or the modern data and AI ecosystem
• Consulting / professional services background with a hands-on technical foundation
• Proven technical depth to personally build with AI, coach teams with best practices, drive organisation-wide adoption
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale data platform migrations and AI/ML programs in enterprise environments
• Strong understanding of technical project delivery, including scope, timelines, and SOW management
• Strong stakeholder management skills navigating complex, high-stakes customer environments
• Ability to travel to customer sites approximately 20% of the time

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience at a hyperscaler (Google, AWS, Azure) or a top data/AI company
• An in-house/industry stint alongside vendor-side delivery experience