Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

Cresta is on a mission to turn every customer conversation into a competitive advantage by unlocking the true potential of the contact center. As a Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, you will lead a team that turns cutting-edge AI into real-world customer success, focusing on building and mentoring engineers and refining processes to drive product excellence.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Requirements:

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