Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, ServiceNow

PowerToFly; Arizona; Hybrid; USD 224,000 - 373,000; Full time

Job summary

Deloitte is seeking a Lead ServiceNow FDE to guide forward-deployed engineering pods delivering GenAI solutions for strategic clients. You will set technical direction, remove blockers, and stay hands-on with design, review, and implementation.

You will lead executive discovery, define metrics, and align sponsors and IT with a shared vision, while mentoring junior engineers and coordinating onshore/offshore delivery. Strong communication with CIO/CTO and platform leaders is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in CS, data science or engineering.
• 7+ years in software/data engineering or analytics engineering.
• 1+ years building GenAI/LLM-powered solutions in production.
• 1+ years leading project workstreams and translating business problems into AI solutions.
• An advanced degree is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead senior client-facing engineering partnerships with product, data, and platform leaders.
• Define success metrics and phased plans from prototype to production and scaling.
• Mentor and develop junior engineers within the pods.

Skills

Client leadership

Executive engagement

Delivery leadership

Cross-functional leadership

Architectural direction

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science or Engineering

Advanced degree

ServiceNow ITSM certification

Certified Application Developer (CAD)

Tools

Claude Code

GitHub

Now Assist

Moveworks integration

Job description

At Deloitte, Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) don't just build AI solutions, they help clients turn AI ambition into enterprise-scale impact, pairing leading class engineering with pod-based delivery and vertical expertise. If you thrive at the intersection of product, engineering, problem-solving, and client impact, this role puts you at the forefront of AI transformations.

Work you'll do

As a Lead ServiceNow FDE, you will serve as the senior practitioner-leader embedded directly with our most strategic clients, leading forward-deployed engineering pods that develop and deploy GenAI solutions into production for Deloitte's most strategic clients. You'll set technical direction, remove delivery blockers, and stay hands-on; designing, reviewing, and debugging systems with the team. You'll translate engineering trade-offs into clear decisions for client leaders when needed. Your ability to influence decisions at the C-suite level, while maintaining hands-on technical credibility, is what sets you apart. Pods under your leadership may be deployed onshore with clients or in hybrid onshore/offshore configurations, leveraging Deloitte's global delivery capability to maximize speed and scale.

Client Engagement

• Serve as the senior client-facing presence, building trusted advisor relationships as the senior engineering partner for client product, data, and platform leaders
• Lead executive-level discovery, define success metrics (quality, latency, cost, adoption, risk) and a phased plan from prototype to production and scaling
• Navigate organizational complexity and influence to align executive sponsors, IT leadership, and business owners around a shared vision
• Represent Deloitte's FDE capability in client pursuits, executive briefings, and platform partner engagements-contributing to pipeline development and deal shaping.

Cross-Functional Pod Leadership & Program Governance

• Lead FDE pods of 2-5 onshore anchored and offshore supported engineers, owning execution, resource management, escalations and overall delivery health
• Enforce delivery standards across the pod: sprint cadences, stakeholder communication plans, risk management, and quality gates
• Coordinate multi-pod or multi-workstream engagements, ensuring reliable architecture and consistent client experience.
• Mentor and develop junior FDEs

GenAI Solution Development

• Architect and oversee delivery of LLM-enabled applications including copilots, agentic workflows, assistants, and knowledge search experiences using one or more enterprise AI platforms (see Platform Requirements below)
• Set direction for prompt engineering, tool-use patterns, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Govern end-to-end RAG pipeline design-including ingestion, chunking, embedding, vector retrieval, and hybrid search-ensuring production-grade quality and scalability.
• Define evaluation frameworks covering quality, hallucination risk, safety, latency, cost, and governance; ensure the pod meets agreed engineering quality bars to these standards.

Engineering & Data Foundations

• Review and contribute to production-quality code
• Guide architecture of data pipelines powering GenAI use cases
• Enforce strong data management, testing, CI/CD, logging, versioning, and documentation practices
• Deep familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud)

The team

Our ServiceNow practice develops strategies and implements systems that help organizations build business value and improve performance. Drawing on deep experience solving complex IT and non-IT challenges globally, we guide clients through everything from system replacement to full Enterprise transformation. We partner with COOs, CHROs, CFOs/CPOs, CISOs, CIOs/CTOs, technology executives, and service owners across HR, IT, Customer, Field Service, and Project Portfolio Management to modernize technology delivery and operating models. By focusing on NextGen technologies and evolving service models, we help clients shift from foundational technology delivery to becoming the strategic business partner and catalyst for change that today's operational demands require.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Data Science or Engineering.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, data science, or analytics engineering.
• 1+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying GenAI/LLM-powered solutions in client or production environments
• 1+ years of experience leading project workstreams/engagements and translating business problems into AI solutions
• 1+ years of experience building reliable, maintainable, and well-documented code
• Ability to travel 50%, on average, based on the work you do and the clients and industries/sectors you serve
• Limited immigration sponsorship may be available
• 10+ years of consulting or relevant industry experience
• 4+ years of experience overseeing multiple project teams
• ServiceNow ITSM certification
• Certified Application Developer (CAD)
• A minimum of 2 full life cycle ServiceNow ITSM implementations
• A minimum of 2 ServiceNow upgrade deployments
• Experience across IT Service Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, and Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
• Experience with the ITIL framework
• 3+ years' experience as an engagement manager
• Project scoping, estimating, and planning experience
• Sales experience
• Experience leading ServiceNow GenAI/agentic transformations (Now Assist, AI Agents) with familiarity governing enterprise AI via ServiceNow AI Control Tower; exposure to Moveworks-based conversational AI a plus
• Proven ability to lead architecture of enterprise-scale ServiceNow solutions and advise CIOs and technology executives on platform strategy, roadmap, and capability adoption. ServiceNow SDK experience with Claude and/or GitHub is a plus
• Track record deploying Claude Code-augmented delivery at scale, including agentic workstreams, MCP orchestration, subagent parallelization, and hooks-based guardrails across engagements
• Experience building reusable Claude Code skill libraries and slash commands for ServiceNow development patterns to accelerate delivery across a practice
• Experience training and upskilling customer engineering teams on agentic coding best practices
• Demonstrated ability to quantify and communicate delivery acceleration to executive stakeholders (e.g., runbooks and documentation evidencing reduced delivery time)

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud) and common platform services (storage, compute, IAM, networking)

• Demonstrated ability to work directly alongside client technical teams and program stakeholders in fast-paced, ambiguous delivery environments

• Data engineering experience with Spark, Airflow/dbt, streaming, data modeling or ML/data science background feature engineering, experimentation or model evaluation
• Experience with MLOps/LLMOps practices: evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, and prompt management

• Experience integrating LLM solutions with enterprise systems via APIs, microservices, or event-driven architectures

• Experience operating within hybrid onshore/offshore teams

• Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance considerations

• ServiceNow Certified Master Architect (CMA) or Certified Technical Architect (CTA)
• 4+ years of experience generating new client business
• Experience developing client relationships, identifying new opportunities, and shaping follow-on engagements for continuous improvement
• Business development experience selling 3+ year deals, including offering structure and support for those deals
• An advanced degree

The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled. At Deloitte, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $223,700 to $372900.

You may also be eligible to participate in a discretionary annual incentive program, subject to the rules governing the program, whereby an award, if any, depends on various factors, including, without limitation, individual and organizational performance.