Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

About the role:

At Cresta, shipping AI is only half the story. Deploying it successfully is where the real impact happens.

As Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, you'll lead the team that turns cutting-edge AI into real-world customer success. You'll build, mentor, and scale a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who work directly with customers to deliver AI agents that solve practical business problems and drive measurable outcomes.

This is a high-impact leadership role for someone who loves building teams, refining processes, and driving product excellence through deep customer engagement. You'll be at the intersection of engineering, product, and go-to-market — ensuring that Cresta delivers exceptional value at scale.

Travel Expectations: 10-25% travel for customer visits, team offsites, and company events

This role is perfect for someone who:

• Has been in the trenches as an FDE or similar customer-facing engineering role and wants to scale that impact through leadership
• Thrives on building high-performing teams and developing talent
• Loves turning customer insights into product improvements
• Gets energized by complex deployments, ambiguous problems, and fast-paced environments
• Believes that engineering excellence and customer obsession go hand-in-hand

Why You'll Love This Role: 

• High impact, high visibility: You'll own one of the most strategic functions at Cresta — the team that turns AI into customer success
• Build something new: FDE at Cresta is still being defined. You'll shape the function, the culture, and the playbook
• Work with cutting-edge AI: You'll be hands-on with state-of-the-art AI agents, LLMs, and enterprise deployments at scale
• Develop world-class talent: You'll recruit and mentor some of the best engineers in the industry
• Influence product strategy: Your insights will directly shape what Cresta builds and how we win in enterprise
• Collaborate with the best: You'll work alongside world-class teams across product, engineering, and go-to-market
• Move fast, see impact: This isn't a slow-moving enterprise role. You'll ship fast, iterate, and see your work drive measurable customer outcomes

What You'll Do :

Build and Scale the FDE Team

• Recruit top talent: Own hiring strategy and execution for FDEs, building a diverse team of engineers who blend technical excellence with customer empathy
• Develop your team: Mentor FDEs through hands-on coaching, career development, and technical guidance
• Define the role: Evolve the FDE career ladder, competencies, and growth paths as the function matures
• Foster culture: Build a team culture grounded in ownership, customer-first mentality, and continuous learning

Refine Processes and Drive Operational Excellence

• Optimize the customer lifecycle: Design and refine how FDEs engage across sales, implementation, and long-tail support
• Scale what works: Identify patterns in successful deployments and turn them into repeatable processes
• Balance speed and quality: Establish frameworks for scoping, prioritization, and delivery that enable FDEs to move fast without sacrificing quality
• Measure what matters: Define team metrics and KPIs tied to customer outcomes, deployment velocity, and product adoption

Drive Product Improvements

• Be the voice of the customer: Synthesize customer feedback, pain points, and feature requests to inform product roadmap priorities
• Close the feedback loop: Partner closely with Product and Engineering teams to advocate for improvements that unlock enterprise value
• Build vs. buy vs. hack: Guide FDEs in making smart trade-offs between quick fixes, generalizable features, and platform investments
• Champion generalization: Push the team to build scalable solutions, not one-off customizations, while still delivering customer value quickly

Lead Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product: Work with PMs to translate customer insights into product strategy and roadmap decisions
• Align with Engineering: Collaborate with core engineering teams to ensure FDE-built features integrate seamlessly into the platform
• Enable Go-to-Market: Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success to scope opportunities, manage expectations, and deliver successful outcomes
• Influence leadership: Present customer insights, deployment learnings, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership

Stay Hands-On (When Needed)

• Jump into the fire: Roll up your sleeves to support critical deployments, troubleshoot complex issues, or unblock your team
• Stay technical: Maintain credibility by staying close to the codebase, understanding AI agent architecture, and contributing when it matters most
• Lead by example: Model the behaviors you want to see — customer empathy, technical depth, ownership, and urgency

What We're Looking For: 

• Engineering management experience: At least 2 years managing, mentoring, and growing engineering teams
• Customer-facing engineering background: Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Implementation Engineer, or similar role working directly with customers
• Technical depth: Strong software engineering fundamentals (coding, system design, APIs, databases) — you've built production systems and can earn the respect of senior engineers
• AI/LLM familiarity: Hands-on experience with AI agents, LLMs, prompt engineering, or ML deployments in production
• Hiring and talent development: Proven track record of recruiting, onboarding, and developing high-performing engineers
• Cross-functional leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence and collaborate across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success teams
• Bias toward action: You ship fast, iterate, and believe that perfect is the enemy of good
• Customer empathy: Deep understanding of enterprise customer needs and the ability to translate technical concepts into business value
• Startup or scale-up experience: You've been in fast-paced, high-growth environments where you wore multiple hats
• Enterprise B2B background: Experience with complex, multi-stakeholder deployments and long sales cycles
• Product mindset: You think like a product manager — understanding market needs, prioritization, and trade-offs
• Process design: You've built processes from scratch and iterated on them based on what works
• Founder or entrepreneurial experience: You've started something, built something from zero, or operated with extreme ownership

Perks & Benefits:

We offer a comprehensive and people-first benefits package to support you at work and in life:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with plans to fit you and your family
• Flexible PTO to take the time you need, when you need it
• Paid parental leave for all new parents welcoming a new child
• Retirement savings plan to help you plan for the future
• Remote work setup budget to help you create a productive home office
• Monthly wellness and communication stipend to keep you connected and balanced
• In-office meal program and commuter benefits provided for onsite employees

Compensation at Cresta: 

Cresta’s approach to compensation is simple: recognize impact, reward excellence, and invest in our people. We offer competitive, location-based pay that reflects the market and what each individual brings to the table.

The posted base salary range represents what we expect to pay for this role in a given location. Final offers are shaped by factors like experience, skills, education, and geography. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and a comprehensive benefits package for you and your family.

Base Salary Range: $205,000–$280,000 + Annual Bonus & Offers Equity

We have noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where scammers attempt to access candidates' personal and financial information through fake interviews and offers. All Cresta recruiting email communications will always come from the @cresta.ai domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Cresta via other sources should be ignored.  If you are uncertain whether you have been contacted by an official Cresta employee, reach out to recruiting@cresta.ai