Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers delivering high-impact customer integrations and automation.
• Define and scale the FDE program — building repeatable processes for project scoping, delivery, quality, and handoff.
• Serve as both player and coach: actively contribute to customer engagements while developing the long-term vision for the program.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to identify patterns from customer work that should become productized features.
• Partner with Customer Success and Solutions teams to ensure customer needs are translated into reliable, production-ready implementations.
• Design, implement, test, and operate connectors, APIs, and provisioning flows that integrate C1 with external systems.
• Provide technical guidance and review across projects, ensuring best practices around security, observability, and maintainability.
• Build feedback loops that turn customer experience into roadmap insight and continuous improvement for the FDE team.
• Hire and onboard new Forward Deployed Engineers, establishing a strong team culture of ownership, pragmatism, and customer obsession.
• Occasionally travel to meet with customers, lead workshops, or support major deployments.

Requirements

• Experienced engineer or technical leader who enjoys building teams as much as building software.
• Track record of managing or mentoring engineers in customer-facing or professional services roles.
• Skilled at balancing hands-on technical delivery with leadership and program-building responsibilities.
• Strong experience in Go (preferred) or another backend language such as Python, TypeScript, or Java.
• Fluent in APIs, webhooks, and modern identity standards (SCIM, SAML, OAuth) and experience building integrations with third-party services.
• Communicate clearly with both engineers and executives, and can represent technical decisions confidently to customers.
• Thrive in a fast-paced, iterative environment and enjoy helping others succeed in ambiguous situations.

Nice-to-Haves

• Built or managed a forward deployed, solutions engineering, or professional services function at a SaaS company.
• Experience designing processes or tooling for scalable delivery of customer-facing engineering work.
• Led or contributed to reusable connector or SDK frameworks (e.g., Baton connectors, connector runners).
• Experience with identity and access management systems such as Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, or Active Directory.
• Helped define or influence product direction based on customer implementation learnings.
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), observability tools (DataDog/Prometheus), and CI/CD pipelines.