Forward Deployed Engineer Manager

SewerAI Corporation

1d•$160,000 - $190,000

About The Position

SewerAI is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to lead its Forward Deployed Engineering team. This player-coach role combines hands-on customer delivery with team leadership. The manager will continue shipping technical work, including integrations and migration debugging, while developing the team and systems needed to scale deployments. The team currently consists of two full-time FDEs and a contractor, with plans to grow. The role owns technical delivery quality, customer outcomes, and team capacity. It includes managing customer relationships from kickoff through go-live and handoff to Customer Success; leading technical discovery and customer communications; delivering integrations, migrations, and escalations; and turning recurring custom work into reusable tools, patterns, and product feedback. The manager also oversees day-to-day team management, prioritization across customer projects, scoping with Sales and Solutions Engineering, and collaboration with Product and Engineering to address recurring implementation needs. The position requires about 10% travel for customer kickoffs, workshops, go-lives, and team offsites. Compensation is a base salary of $160,000–$190,000 plus equity.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar hands-on, customer-facing technical role, such as Professional Services, Solutions, Implementation, or Field Engineering.
At least 2 years managing people or leading a technical team.
Strong technical foundation and ability to read code, query data, and find bugs independently.
Experience shipping customer integrations and migrations involving APIs, enterprise systems, and messy legacy data.
Strong customer skills, including building trust, communicating proactively, and remaining calm and credible when projects are at risk.
Experience working with customers who are not technically sophisticated and adapting communication respectfully.
Ability to tell customers or account executives “no” or “not yet” while maintaining the relationship.
Willingness to remain hands-on and take ownership of difficult technical problems.
Ability to identify repeated custom requests and develop reusable solutions.
Strong scope management, including clear timelines, early risk communication, and honest status updates.
Interest in mentoring and supporting the success of others.
Comfort with startup pace, unclear ownership, and creating processes as needed.
Scripting ability in Python, JavaScript, or Bash.
Strong SQL and relational database fundamentals.
Experience with ETL workflows and large-scale data migrations.
Knowledge of REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, and system integrations.
Experience with AWS, including S3, Lambda, and IAM.
Troubleshooting ability across databases, APIs, files, and user interfaces.
Day-to-day use of AI coding tools.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of NASSCO standards (PACP/MACP/LACP) and sewer inspection data.
Experience with GIS and spatial data, including ArcGIS and ArcGIS REST services.
Experience with CMMS and asset management systems such as Cityworks, Cartegraph/OpenGov, Lucity, or VUEWorks.
Experience with inspection platforms such as WinCan or ITpipes.
Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal or integration platforms such as Zapier or Celigo.
Experience with media and large-file ingestion pipelines, SFTP, and file-based exchange.
Experience with municipal utility, public sector, or infrastructure customers.
Experience building delivery playbooks, estimation models, or services catalogs from scratch.

Responsibilities

Own customer relationships from kickoff through go-live and handoff to Customer Success; communicate status, next steps, and risks.
Lead technical discovery with utility IT, GIS, operations teams, and field crews to understand customer workflows.
Explain technical tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and manage expectations, scope, and timelines.
Own escalations on at-risk accounts and follow through until issues are resolved.
Run kickoffs, workshops, and go-live sessions, and write status updates for leadership, Sales, and customers.
Personally lead complex integrations, migrations, and escalations, and turn lessons learned into reusable team patterns.
Design and review integrations with CMMS, GIS, and inspection platforms.
Own data migrations end to end, including extraction, mapping, transformation, validation, and reconciliation of historical inspection, asset, and media data.
Build internal scripts, ETL jobs, validation checks, and deployment templates to reduce the effort required for each deployment.
Manage the team, including 1:1s, onboarding, performance reviews, project assignments, and capacity planning.
Run the FDE standup and prioritize work across the customer portfolio, deciding what to build, phase, decline, or hand off to Product.
Partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering on scoping and technical feasibility before commitments are made.
Bring recurring integration needs and implementation friction to Product and Engineering with supporting evidence.
Help team members improve their technical skills and customer communication.