Forward Deployed Engineering Manager II, Data Cloud, Google Cloud

Google•Sunnyvale, CA

11h•$262,000 - $364,000

About The Position

Google Cloud’s Data Cloud team builds the data platform behind Google’s agentic AI offerings, including BigQuery, Managed Spark, borderless Lakehouse, Spanner, AlloyDB, and Knowledge Catalog, integrated with Gemini Enterprise. The Forward Deployed Engineering Manager leads a customer-facing FDE team that bridges frontier data solutions and production-grade implementations. The team takes customers’ data and machine learning workloads from prototype to production on Google Cloud Data Cloud services. This is a technical leadership role requiring credibility with CTOs and data platform leaders, the ability to review designs and code, and strong engineering talent assessment. The role is part of Google Cloud’s Go-To-Market team and works with its AI portfolio, including Gemini models and the Vertex AI platform.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8 years of experience in cloud computing, technical sales engineering, or software engineering with cloud-native architectures.
2 years of experience managing a software engineering, FDE, or similar technical customer-facing team in a cloud computing environment.
Experience reviewing designs and code in Python, PySpark, and SQL.
Experience designing platforms built on Data Cloud services such as BigQuery, Managed Spark/Lightning Engine, Apache Iceberg (Borderless Lakehouse), Spanner, AlloyDB, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and Kafka.
Experience building agentic AI systems on enterprise data, including agents, retrieval, vector search, and evaluation.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading forward deployed engineering, field engineering, or professional services organizations at a data platform or AI-first company, or a hyperscaler’s data and machine learning services team.
Experience engaging credibly with multi-level executives and engineers.
Experience with Google Cloud data products, or experience participating against them.
Experience across a broad range of Data Cloud specializations, including Data Engineering, Data Science/Machine Learning, Application Development, Operations, and Analytical Databases/Data Management.
Experience building end-to-end data pipelines, engineering features, and training and deploying machine learning models.
Experience with RAG architectures, chunking and indexing strategies, vector databases, hybrid search, and using data governance to ground agents in enterprise context.

Responsibilities

Serve as the technical lead, establishing code standards, architectural best practices, and benchmarks to elevate engineering excellence across the team.
Partner with Sales and Tech Leadership to define requirements for high-value opportunities and deploy specialized experts to key accounts.
Lead technical hiring for FDE, evaluating data engineering expertise, systems engineering, and coding skills to build an exceptional engineering team.
Identify skill gaps in emerging technologies, including MCP, tool-calling, foundation models, and agent building, and ensure the team maintains subject matter expertise in an evolving data stack.
Collaborate with Product and Engineering to resolve blockers, translate field insights into roadmaps, and build internal tools to drive organizational efficiency.