Engineering Manager (Forward deployed)

DTDL group.; Gurgaon; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs in Gurgaon seeks a seasoned Engineering Manager — Forward Deployed to lead end-to-end NatCo use case delivery, from requirements through integration and launch, across nine European markets. The role demands hands-on integration with enterprise APIs, vendor management, and strong security/process fluency.

You will line-manage Forward Deployed Engineers and squads, align with stakeholders, and own post-launch outcomes including customer experience and deflection

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years of people management.
• Hands-on integration depth with enterprise APIs (REST and event-driven).
• Experience delivering outcomes in front of a customer or partner.
• Vendor onboarding and management with SLAs and milestones.
• Security, privacy and procurement review experience for products.
• Rolling platform deployments across multiple markets or tenants.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of NatCo use cases: from requirements through integration, security clearance, launch and post-launch quality.
• Coordinate across squads to surface dependencies early and sequence work with the capability PODs.
• Own post-launch outcomes: deflection, containment, and customer experience after the switch is flipped.
• Manage technology partners as delivery collaborators with defined entry/exit criteria and SLAs.
• Ensure security and privacy reviews are addressed efficiently to accelerate launches.

Skills

Software engineering

Engineering management

Integration depth

Customer delivery

Vendor management

Security & compliance

Multi-market rollout

AI systems literacy

Time-zone collaboration

Tools

Java

Python

REST APIs

Event-driven

Job description

Company: Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs, GurgaonDeutsche Telekom Digital Labs is the behind-the-scenes powerhouse that fuels Deutsche Telekom’s passion & commitment to cutting edge innovation & out of the world customer experience.We create compelling digital propositions for the worlds’ largest Telekom giant by building scalable and agile platforms to provide the best of digital experience to Deutsche Telekom customers across Europe.We aim to bring all the Deutsche Telekom customers on to our digital products by simplifying the experience. This includes innovative approaches to allow the user to explore compelling propositions, recommend most suitable services based on micro segmentation and so on.You ask what’s in it for you? We say,An opportunity to build digital products from scratch (literally from scratch!) for one of the leading European telecoms(Deutsche Telekom)using latest technologies & on cloud native platforms.Enhanced customer experience, convergence, and increased business productivity, continuously investing into entrepreneurial value creation projects to build agility and cross functional teams in order to steer innovative business models.We are agile and focused on the overall make up of theteam. We believe that with the right team - anything is possible. If you’re looking for an environment that’s fun and friendly but incredibly fast-paced; a place where we measure the time between releases in days; a place where our focus begins and ends at the consumer - join us!

Role: Engineering Manager — Forward Deployed

Why this role exists:

OneBot deflects contact-center volume for Deutsche Telekom across nine European markets. The platform strategy has moved from building a single bot we own to running the harness that routes across best-of-breed dialog engines — Parloa, ElevenLabs, Wonderful, Decagon and OneBot — with a shared context layer beneath.That split creates two genuinely different engineering jobs. Three PODs build reusable capability: the Router, the Harness capabilities, and the Stability and Acceleration platform. This POD does not build capability. It owns the delivery of use cases inside the NatCos — getting engines live market by market, integrating APIs from systems we do not control, and clearing the business, security and procurement barriers that stand between a working capability and a customer being served by it.Historically that work was squeezed between platform priorities and NatCo deadlines, with no single owner. The result was repeated: multiple divergent integration patterns with vendors, per-country workarounds, and platform features paused mid-build. This role exists to own the outcome — and to own it without fragmenting the platform.

Delivery ownership:

• Own end-to-end delivery of NatCo use cases: from requirement through integration, security clearance, launch and post-launch quality.
• Hold the launch date. Sequence work across your squads, surface dependencies on the capability PODs early, and elevate rather than absorb.
• Own post-launch outcomes, not just go-live — deflection, containment and customer experience are yours after the switch is flipped.

Partners and vendors

• Run technology and dialog-engine partners as delivery partners: onboarding under IT guidelines with defined entry and exit criteria, integration milestones, and SLAs that hold.
• Be the single technical point of contact partners elevate to, and the person who holds them to commitments.

Stakeholders, security and compliance

• Work with NatCo business owners, product, PSA, security, privacy and procurement to clear the non-engineering blockers that stall AI launches.
• Drive security and privacy review to a decision — anticipate what reviewers will ask and bring it before they ask.

People and team

• Line-manage the Forward Deployed Engineers and squad leads: hiring, growth, performance, and building the FDE career path.
• Build a team that is credible in front of a customer and in a code review — deploy engineers into markets without losing their engineering depth.

Platform discipline

• Push fixes and patterns discovered in the field back upstream into the owning capability POD, rather than solving them locally.
• Say no to the fast local workaround. Protecting one implementation across nine markets is part of the job, not a constraint on it.

Must-have skills and experience:

• Experience. 10+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers with hiring and performance ownership.
• Hands-on integration depth. You have personally shipped production integrations against enterprise APIs — REST and event-driven — in Java, Python or equivalent. You can read the code your team writes and review a design.
• Customer-facing delivery. You have owned delivery in front of a customer, a partner or an internal business unit, where the commitment was yours and the systems were not.
• Vendor management. Onboarding and managing technology partners: commercial and technical entry criteria, integration milestones, SLA enforcement, and a defined exit.
• Security and compliance fluency. You have taken a product through enterprise security, privacy and procurement review — PSA, DPIA, pen-test remediation or the equivalent — and know how to shorten it.
• Multi-market rollout. Rolling the same platform into multiple markets, tenants or customers, and holding one implementation while doing it.
• AI systems literacy. Working knowledge of how modern LLM applications are built and operated: prompts and operating procedures, tool calling and MCP, RAG, evaluation, and voice pipelines including STT, TTS, endpointing and barge-in. Enough to hold an architectural line in a partner conversation — you are not expected to invent the architecture.
• Ways of working. Comfortable operating across time zones with European stakeholders, with regular travel to markets.

Nice to have:

• Telecommunications or contact-center domain experience — IVR, CCaaS, routing, agent desktop.
• A forward-deployed or solutions-engineering background, where engineers are embedded in the customer's environment to deliver an outcome.

What this role is not:

Not a programme or project manager. The POD has a dedicated TPM who owns programme mechanics, cross-POD dependencies and reporting. This role owns the engineering team and the outcome.

Not an individual-contributor architect. Engineers report to you. People leadership is a first-class part of the job, not an overhead on it.