Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Leads and grows a customer-facing engineering team delivering complex data engineering and AI solutions for strategic customers. The role combines people leadership, executive stakeholder management, hands-on technical escalation, and expertise in modern data platforms and cloud technologies.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead, hire, mentor, and grow a team of approximately 10 Forward Deployed Engineers.
- Build a culture of technical excellence, customer focus, and strong execution.
- Partner with customers and internal stakeholders to shape complex engagements and deliver business outcomes on the Databricks platform.
- Guide end-to-end solution delivery, including discovery, architecture, implementation, deployment, and enablement.
- Build trusted relationships with technical and executive stakeholders as a senior advisor.
- Serve as the team’s senior technical escalation point, reviewing architectures, debugging production issues, and making high-stakes technical decisions.
- Coach engineers on solution design, stakeholder management, delivery quality, and career development.
- Partner with Sales, Field Engineering, Product, and Professional Services leadership on account strategy, staffing, and execution.
- Develop reusable patterns, delivery best practices, technical assets, and team processes.
- Help expand data engineering-led transformations involving modern data platforms, pipelines, governance, and production workloads.
Requirements
- Experience leading, hiring, and developing high-performing technical teams in customer-facing environments.
- Current hands-on technical credibility, including design reviews, production debugging, and technical escalation ownership.
- Strong background in data engineering, big data systems, and production data platform delivery.
- Experience with ingestion, transformation, orchestration, warehousing, analytics/BI, or streaming in enterprise environments.
- Strong hands-on fluency in Python and SQL.
- Experience scoping and guiding complex technical engagements, managing escalations, and delivering across multiple stakeholders.
- Strong executive communication skills and ability to translate technical decisions into business impact.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving, high-visibility customer environments.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Fluent Japanese and business-level English required.
Nice-to-haves
- Familiarity with Apache Spark and JVM languages such as Scala or Java.
- Experience delivering lakehouse, analytics, or AI-adjacent solutions in complex enterprise environments.
- Deep understanding of distributed data processing and modern data architecture patterns.
- Familiarity with data governance, security, and platform operating models.
- Experience building reusable delivery frameworks, technical accelerators, or practice-level standards.
- Track record of influencing cross-functional strategy across sales, product, and delivery organizations.
- Experience operationalizing AI coding tools such as Genie, Claude Code, or Codex.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits and perks tailored to regional employee needs.
Skills
Python, SQL, Spark, Scala, Java, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Data Engineering, Big Data, Data Warehousing, Data Governance, Data Streaming, Artificial Intelligence, Databricks
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