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