Americas Head of Forward-Deployed Engineering

C3.ai, Inc.; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

C3 AI, based in Redwood City, California, seeks a Senior Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, Americas, to lead and scale our customer‑facing engineering organization across the region. You will manage 5–10 FDE managers and engineers across 50–100 engineers, shaping delivery, architecture review, and customer outcomes while partnering with Sales, Product, and Industry Leaders.

This executive role requires deep technical depth, strategic thinking, and exceptional leadership to drive

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or another technical discipline.
• 12+ years of professional software engineering or highly technical product development experience.
• 7+ years of experience leading highly technical engineering organizations, including significant experience managing engineering managers or other technical leaders.
• Demonstrated experience building, scaling, and operating customer-facing engineering teams.
• Deep understanding of modern software engineering, including full-stack application development, distributed systems, data platforms, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise software architecture.
• Demonstrated experience delivering complex enterprise software into production environments.
• Strong technical judgment with the ability to review architecture, evaluate engineering tradeoffs, identify technical risk, and challenge engineering teams constructively.
• Proven track record recruiting, developing, retaining, and managing high‑performing engineering teams.
• Experience managing organizational performance, including goal setting, coaching, performance management, succession planning, organizational design, and span of control.
• Demonstrated ability to operate across a portfolio of concurrent customer engagements and make effective staffing and prioritization decisions.
• Excellent executive communication skills with the ability to engage effectively with senior customer and internal stakeholders.
• Strong customer orientation and demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, technical complexity, and high‑pressure customer situations.
• Ability to travel as required.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Americas Forward Deployed Engineering organization and scale multiple FDE pods and their managers.
• Own regional technical execution and ensure production-quality enterprise AI applications on the C3 AI Platform.
• Lead and develop engineering managers; coach them on technical leadership, people management, staffing, performance management, and customer execution.
• Set the operating model for the region; organize, staff, deploy, and manage across customer accounts.
• Maintain accountability for customer delivery; review engagement health, risks, and delivery commitments.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point; engage with strategic customers and executives on complex challenges.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards across deployments for architecture, design, code quality, testing, security, and scalability.
• Stay hands-on to review architecture and support critical customer engagements when needed.
• Build and retain a high-performing organization; recruit and develop technical talent and leadership pipelines.
• Partner with Industry Solution Leaders and Sales/Product teams to translate customer problems into scalable solutions.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Full-stack dev

Cloud infra

Enterprise software

Architecture review

People management

Executive comm

Customer delivery

Mentoring managers

Travel readiness

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics

Tools

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Java

React

Angular

Vue

CI/CD

Observability

Job description

C3 AI, based in Redwood City, California, seeks a Senior Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, Americas, to lead and scale our customer‑facing engineering organization across the region. You will manage 5–10 FDE managers and engineers across 50–100 engineers, shaping delivery, architecture review, and customer outcomes while partnering with Sales, Product, and Industry Leaders.

This executive role requires deep technical depth, strategic thinking, and exceptional leadership to drive