Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

Nexus Cognitive Technologies•Atlanta, GA

About The Position

This is the person who, from the moment a customer signs, owns whether NX1 delivers for them. Not a project manager who tracks tickets. Not a CSM who runs QBRs. This is the delivery and technical operations owner at a portfolio of NX1's strategic accounts. Solution delivery is the operative phrase. The work is: understand the customer's actual business problem, translate it into the requirements the NX1 platform and engineering team will solve for, design the engagement around that solution, and drive it to ground until the customer is winning. Everything else — program mechanics, executive presence, margin, documentation — is in service of that solution landing. You are the buck-stops-here owner for whether NX1 delivers: the rollout program, the solution architecture and roadmap commitments, the documentation surface, the customer health signal at the engineering level, the margin against the engagement, and the loop back into engineering when the platform needs to evolve.

Requirements

5–8 years in a customer-facing solution delivery, consulting, or forward-deployed role (e.g., Forward Deployed Engineer, Engagement Manager, Solutions Architect with delivery scope, strategic Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineering Lead, Implementation Lead, or equivalent).
Operationally rigorous with a strong track record of delivering against customer needs, focusing on outcomes rather than just activity.
Has personally owned a customer's outcome end-to-end at an enterprise account.
Communicates with precision across different levels, adapting register for engineers, VPs, and C-suite.
Bidirectional translator with experience translating customer requirements into buildable engineering tasks and engineering trade-offs into executive decisions.
Problem ownership mindset: takes ownership of issues until resolved, regardless of defined roles.
Combines the structural muscle of a top-tier consulting engagement manager (client management, structured thinking, exec presence, written clarity) with the entrepreneurial streak of a founder.
Experience working inside a startup or scale-up engineering organization (Series A through D).
Technically fluent enough to read architecture documents, ask pertinent questions, and participate in engineering discussions without a translator.
Experience with modern program tooling like Linear and Notion, or ability to adapt from tools like Jira/Asana/Confluence.
Strong written communication skills, producing status updates that drive decisions, readable postmortems, and persuasive memos.
High agency: proactively closes loops, defines playbooks, and provides constructive pushback.
Data, cloud, or platform infrastructure background strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

Has worked at Palantir (FDE), Anthropic / OpenAI (FDE / Solutions), Databricks (Field Eng / CE), Stripe (Implementation / Solutions), Ramp / Mercury (Solutions), Scale AI (FDE), or a comparable forward-deployed environment.
Has carried direct gross margin or P&L responsibility on accounts.
Engineering background (CS degree, engineering IC role, or credible technical foundation).
Has been the person who wrote the playbook, not just executed someone else's.

Responsibilities

Account Ownership, Delivery, and Gross Margin: Manage a portfolio of 2–4 strategic NX1 accounts, each with $5–10M in delivery / managed services revenue. Own gross margin management for the portfolio, including unit economics, cost-to-serve per account, scope discipline, hero-engineer-attrition risk, and custom work that doesn't generalize. Manage the P&L for those accounts, driving against deliverables and gross margin, and surfacing risks early. Own the customer-side executive relationship, acting as a peer to their VP of Data / CDO / CTO. Partner with the CRO on renewal and expansion strategy.
Program & Delivery Operations: Stand up the delivery program on day 1 of a new engagement, including roadmap, milestones, dependencies, governance, and communication cadence. Run the weekly operating rhythm (internal stand-ups, customer syncs, exec readouts, escalation reviews) and build grounding artifacts. Own the documentation surface for each engagement, including program plan, decision log, RAID register, exec status, runbooks, and the customer-facing roadmap view. Utilize Linear and Notion as primary instruments.
Technical Quarterbacking & Requirements Translation: Own the bidirectional translation between the customer's business problem and NX1's engineering reality. Surface the right requirements into the organization and communicate engineering trade-offs back to the customer without distortion. Build requirements collaboratively with customers by knowing what to ask and what to push back on. Pull in Solution Architects and FDEs/engineers as needed. Hold the line on technical commitments regarding scope, roadmap asks, and custom builds. Act as the technical liaison, understanding architecture documents, asking sharp questions, and summarizing for both customer CTOs and engineering teams.
Customer Health & Outcomes: Define what "winning" looks like for each customer in writing within the first 60 days and instrument it. Build customer-health signals to catch problems early, such as usage trajectory, executive sentiment, milestone slippage, support ticket patterns, and roadmap dependency drift. Run quarterly business reviews that are highly valued by the customer's executive team. Convert customer pain points into product roadmap input and close the loop when changes are implemented.
Commercial Partnership: Partner with the CRO on expansion conversations, bringing technical credibility and relationship insights. Hold the cost-to-serve number for engagements, distinguishing between managed services scope, paid one-offs, and roadmap asks. Identify and escalate early signals of churn risk. Write the renewal narrative, detailing delivered value, customer changes, and future plans.
Build the Function: Define the engagement playbook for NX1. Codify successful practices across the portfolio into reusable artifacts for future hires. Influence the operating model between Forward Engineering, the MSO function, and Sales, clarifying seams, ownership, and handoffs.