Forward Deployed Strategist

Cursor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor seeks a Forward Deployed Strategist to own strategic customer engagements from discovery to delivery. You will sit with executive sponsors, identify high-value use cases, and translate them into tightly scoped projects, then ensure outcomes are achieved in collaboration with the FDE.

You will work in a small, flat team, staying hands-on with configuration, workflows, and platform tooling while translating technical builds into business value for executive leadership.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in Solutions Architecture, Deployment Strategy, technical consulting, or an Engagement Manager role.
• Experience shaping strategic customer engagements and translating business needs into technical plans.
• Comfort with AI-native workflows and production environments.

Responsibilities

• Own key customer engagements from scoping through delivery and handoff.
• Lead discovery and architecture reviews, surface integration complexity and constraints.
• Collaborate with FDEs and executive sponsors to deliver tightly scoped, high-ROI projects.
• Translate business outcomes to technical implementations and drive adoption.
• Build reusable playbooks and contribute to roadmap decisions with Product/Engineering.

Skills

Solutions Architecture

Deployment Strategy

Technical Consulting

Engagement Management

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Cursor workflows

Tools

Cursor workflows

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Job description

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.

About The Role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Strategist to own our most strategic customer engagements - from first workshop through delivery. You'll sit with executive sponsors, surface the highest-value use cases, turn them into tightly scoped projects, then stay accountable for the outcome, working with the FDE.

You'll typically work in a pod of one Strategist and 1-2 FDEs. You own the executive relationship and the shape of delivery; the FDE embeds with the customer's team and owns the deeper production builds. You'll stay hands-on at the configuration layer week to week, including workflows, integrations, and platform tooling, partnering with the FDE where the build is most complex. You will translate technical build into business outcomes and own the adoption of the build.

This is for someone who combines technical credibility in agentic coding and LLMs with the executive presence to earn trust in the boardroom, and the judgment to keep engagements scoped tight, delivered fast, and worth repeating.

What you’ll do

• Scope
  • Partner with customer executive sponsors to scope FDE projects — translating ambiguous business problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROI
  • Lead technical discovery and architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints to validate that every engagement is technically feasible

Deliver

• Work side by side with the FDE on the technical build — you own the configuration layer including workflows, settings, integrations, and platform tooling that don't require heavy custom code while the FDE owns the deeper production builds
• Own technical enablement and adoption: run hands-on training, build playbooks and reference workflows, and coach the customer's team until they're self-sufficient. Adoption is measured by what their users do without you in the room
• Monitor technical feasibility throughout delivery, adjusting scope with the sponsor when constraints emerge rather than letting engagements drift
• Identify and scope expansion opportunities as they surface during delivery, in partnership with the account team
• Escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions
• Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time

Own the executive relationship

• Establish and maintain the executive relationship on your engagements, serving as the primary point of contact from kickoff through handoff
• Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it
• Translate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions — for the sponsor and for the build team

You may be a fit if

• You've spent 6+ years in Solutions Architecture, Deployment Strategy, technical consulting, or an Engagement Manager seat where you owned scoping and delivery with a technical team in AI-production workflows
• You understand agentic coding and LLMs well enough to hold your own with senior eng: how they behave in production, where they fail, and what a resilient workflow looks like (you don't need to be the person writing the production code)
• You're comfortable hands-on with Cursor workflows, integrations, and platform config, and can read enough Python / JS-TS to partner with an FDE
• You've shipped AI-native workflows past the prototype stage and can tell a real production constraint from a nice-to-have
• You can walk into an unfamiliar enterprise eng org, find the highest-leverage intervention fast, and scope something that delivers concrete value in weeks, not quarters
• You have the executive presence to own the C-suite relationship and the technical credibility to earn trust with their eng leads
• Domain depth in FSI, insurance, telecom, high-tech, healthcare/life sciences, or semiconductor is a strong plus