Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager

Brightidea New Job Board; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Brightidea is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager in New York to bridge customer needs with product teams. You will scope requests, build on the Brightidea platform, and prototype rapidly, while guiding enterprise customers through complex deployments.

You will also drive internal tooling projects, collaborate with Sales, CS, Marketing, and People Ops, and help automate workflows to scale a 40-person company. Strong communication and product intuition are essential.

Qualifications

• Eight+ years building software in a role with user interaction.
• Comfort presenting to enterprise stakeholders and senior IT reviews.
• Ability to judge scope and communicate early estimates.
• Fluent vibe coding with production-ready judgment.
• Self-direction in a remote company with limited process.

Responsibilities

• Join calls with enterprise customers to scope feature requests and identify underlying needs.
• Build solutions directly on the Brightidea platform—configurations, integrations, scripts, API work, prototypes.
• Prototype quickly with AI and harden surviving ideas for production.
• Convert recurring requests into a case for platform functionality with Product/Engineering.
• Own technical escalations and unblock deployments at high-stakes accounts.
• Document the handoff so Customer Success can support what was built.

Skills

Enterprise stakeholder communication

Judgment on scope

Vibe coder

Self-direction in remote work

Clear writing

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager

New York

Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager

About Brightidea

Brightidea is the enterprise innovation management platform behind programs at Coca-Cola, Merck, Nike, and hundreds of other global organizations. We've been at this for 26 years, we're profitable, and we're a ~40-person team — which means small surface area, short decision paths, and a lot of leverage per person.

About the role

This is the role for an engineer who wants to be in the room where the problem is described, not three tickets downstream from it.

You'll sit between our largest customers and our product. When an innovation program lead at a Fortune 500 says "this almost works, but we need X," you're the person who figures out what X really is, decides whether it's a configuration, an integration, a prototype, or a genuine product gap — and then builds the answer. Some of what you build ships to one customer next week. Some of it becomes product.

The other half of the job points inward. Our own teams — sales, customer success, marketing, people ops — have workflows that are held together by spreadsheets and manual steps. You'll take on special projects to automate them, wire up internal tools and AI-assisted workflows, and make a 40-person company operate like a much larger one.

What you'll do

With customers

• Join calls with enterprise customers to scope feature requests, distinguishing the stated ask from the underlying job to be done
• Build solutions directly on the Brightidea platform — configurations, custom integrations, scripts, API work, and prototypes — often within days rather than quarters
• Vibe code with AI to get a working prototype in front of the customer while the conversation is still live, then harden what survives contact with reality
• Turn recurring one-off requests into a case for platform functionality, and work with Product and Engineering to get it built properly
• Own technical escalations and unblock deployments at accounts where the stakes are high
• Write the documentation and handoff that lets Customer Success support what you built without calling you

With internal teams

• Take on special projects from across the company: internal tooling, data pipelines, reporting, AI-assisted workflows, automation of manual processes
• Scope quickly, build pragmatically, and know when a problem deserves a durable system versus a vibe-coded script that saves someone six hours a week
• Partner with our AI lead on where AI genuinely removes work rather than decorating it
• Leave things better instrumented than you found them

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building software in a role where you talked to the people using it — forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, implementation engineering, or a small-company generalist role
• Real comfort in front of enterprise stakeholders — you can hold a room with a VP of Innovation and a skeptical IT security reviewer in it
• Judgment about scope: you can tell a two-day fix from a two-quarter project and say so honestly, early
• Fluent vibe coder — you build fast with Claude Code, Cursor, or similar, and you have the judgment to know which output is production-ready, which needs a rewrite, and which should never have been generated at all
• Self-direction that holds up in a remote company with limited process — you pick up ambiguous problems and return with something working
• Writing that's clear enough to substitute for a meeting

Helpful, not required: enterprise SaaS experience, SSO/SAML and enterprise security review exposure, innovation management or corporate strategy familiarity, prior time at a company under 100 people.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Brightidea New Job Board’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.