Senior Forward Deployed Engineer Manager, Data and AI

Google•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is a specialized product incubation engine dedicated to accelerating product market fit for our unified data cloud and AI capabilities. Tasked with bridging the gap between our powerful platform primitives and the cohesive, high value solutions enterprises demand, this group operates as a customer zero laboratory. In this role, you will lead our new team at the forefront of using Google's generative AI to solve real world issues for our most strategic customers. You will act as a partner with key accounts, working to build, deploy, and optimize sophisticated AI agents on our data cloud services. You will bridge the gap between our core product engineering teams and complex customer needs. You will accelerate product innovation, customer success, disrupt the traditional Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and shape the future of our data and AI products. Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
10 years of experience in software engineering, systems architecture, or technical consulting.
3 years of people management experience in technical roles.
2 years of experience with generative AI techniques (e.g., LLMs, multi-modal, large vision models) or with generative AI-related concepts (language modeling, computer vision).

Nice To Haves

6 years of experience designing and deploying cloud-native distributed systems, data pipelines, or AI/ML workflows in an enterprise environment.
5 years of experience in managing a technical team in a cloud computing environment or customer-facing role.
Experience interacting with C-level executives (CTO, CDO, CIO) to translate complex business requirements into technical strategies.

Responsibilities

Serve as the principal architect for the FDE team’s portfolio.
Set the engineering standards, selection of primitives (e.g., agentic frameworks, etc.), and architectural patterns used across lighthouse engagements.
Act as the primary technical counterpart to customer CTOs and CDOs.
Lead architectural workshops to secure executive buy-in, aligning their long-term technology strategy with Google’s data and AI roadmap.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team of FDE.
Guide the team in delivering scalable, and secure solutions.
Identify and resolve complex, cross-product integration issues that threaten the data and AI story.
Lead the resolution of ambiguous technical blockers that span multiple product areas.
Drive systemic improvements in Google Cloud’s product portfolio.
Synthesize technical friction points and feature gaps into authoritative engineering requirements, influencing the roadmaps of directors and VPs in BigQuery, Vertex AI, and database engineering.