Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

About Nexus

You don't have an AI story if you don't have your data story. That's where NexusOne comes in.

We're the converged data platform for the AI era composable by design, built on an open-source foundation, and AI-native from the ground up. One identity, one governance envelope, one operational layer across every mainframe, data lake, warehouse, and streaming system in the business. For the first time, enterprises can bring their existing stack along instead of rebuilding it and still give AI agents full context across the estate.

What we stand for is simple: sovereign data, interoperable systems, decoupled intelligence delivered the way modern software should be. No rip-and-replace. No multi-year transformation. Our CEO Anu Jain puts it well: we turn the "ball of yarn" of data integrations into a unified engine less like assembling car parts, more like buying the car ready to drive. 85+ open-source tools pre-integrated. AI-native automations that deploy and self-heal the stack without human toil. Forward-deployed engineers who build shoulder-to-shoulder with customer teams hands on keyboards, not just on decks.

It's working, and fast. We're tripling revenue year over year, backed by Insight Partners, and running in production in environments most vendors won't touch. Our platform processes credit risk data for 90%+ of US small businesses 40M+ every month. Intent signals for 300M+ subscribers monthly for Africa's largest telco. The data and AI layer for a Top 3 US bank.

We're 100+ people across the US and India, headquartered in Atlanta. We think big, move fast, and don't mistake activity for progress. We hire people who'd rather ship the rocket than brief someone on it.

Role Summary

This is the person who, from the moment a customer signs, owns whether NX1 delivers for them. Not a project manager who tracks tickets. Not a CSM who runs QBRs. This is the delivery and technical operations owner at a portfolio of NX1's strategic accounts.

Solution delivery is the operative phrase. The work is: understand the customer's actual business problem, translate it into the requirements the NX1 platform and engineering team will solve for, design the engagement around that solution, and drive it to ground until the customer is winning. Everything else program mechanics, executive presence, margin, documentation is in service of that solution landing.

You are the buck-stops-here owner for whether NX1 delivers: the rollout program, the solution architecture and roadmap commitments, the documentation surface, the customer health signal at the engineering level, the margin against the engagement, and the loop back into engineering when the platform needs to evolve.

What You'll Own

Account Ownership, Delivery, and Gross Margin (the headline)

• A portfolio of 24 strategic NX1 accounts, $510M each in delivery / managed services revenue

• Gross margin management for the portfolio. You own the unit economics: cost-to-serve per account, scope discipline, hero-engineer-attrition risk, custom work that doesn't generalize. Margin is not finance's job to track it's yours to manage, with finance providing the books

• The P&L for those accounts drive against deliverables AND against gross margin; surface risk on both before it's a number on the dashboard

• The customer-side executive relationship: their VP of Data / CDO / CTO knows you by name and treats you as a peer, not a vendor

• Renewal and expansion strategy, in partnership with the CRO you don't carry quota, but you shape the conditions under which the customer grows

Program & Delivery Operations

• Stand up the delivery program on day 1 of a new engagement: roadmap, milestones, dependencies, governance, communication cadence

• Run the weekly operating rhythm internal stand-ups, customer syncs, exec readouts, escalation reviews and build the artifacts that keep them grounded in reality, not theater

• Own the documentation surface for each engagement: program plan, decision log, RAID register, exec status, runbooks, the customer-facing roadmap view

• Linear and Notion are your primary instruments; you will design how they're used for your portfolio, not inherit a template someone else built

Technical Quarterbacking & Requirements Translation

• Own the bidirectional translation between the customer's business problem and NX1's engineering reality surface the right requirements into the org, surface engineering trade-offs back to the customer, without distorting either side

• This is the craft of the role: customers don't hand you a requirements doc that's correct. You build it together, in conversation, by knowing what to ask and what to push back on

• Pull in Solution Architects when the work needs architecture depth; pull in FDEs / engineers when the work needs to be built

• Hold the line on technical commitments: what's in scope, what's a roadmap ask, what's a one-off custom build the engagement can't absorb

• Be the person who reads the architecture doc, asks the sharp question, and writes the one-page summary the customer's CTO actually reads and the one-page brief the engineering team uses to scope the work

Customer Health & Outcomes

• Define what "winning" looks like for each customer in writing within the first 60 days of an engagement and instrument it

• Build the customer-health signal that catches problems 60 days before they become escalations: usage trajectory, executive sentiment, milestone slippage, support ticket pattern, roadmap dependency drift

• Run quarterly business reviews that the customer's exec team treats as the most useful meeting of the quarter

• Convert customer pain back into product roadmap input and close the loop when it lands

Commercial Partnership

• Partner with the CRO on expansion conversations you bring the technical credibility and the lived relationship; they bring the commercial framing

• Hold the cost-to-serve number for your engagements: what's in scope of the managed service vs. what's a paid one-off vs. what's a roadmap ask

• Spot the early signals of churn risk and escalate them before they harden

• Write the renewal narrative: not the deck the CRO uses to close, but the substance what we delivered, what changed for the customer, what's next

Build the Function

• This is a builder seat, not a maintainer seat. You will define the engagement playbook for NX1, not inherit it

• Codify what works across your portfolio into reusable artifacts the next FDEM hire benefits from

• Influence the operating model between Forward Engineering, the MSO function, and Sales where the seams are, who owns what at each phase, how handoffs actually work

Qualifications

• 58 years in a customer-facing solution delivery, consulting, or forward-deployed role: Forward Deployed Engineer, Engagement Manager (consulting or product), Solutions Architect with delivery scope, strategic-level Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineering Lead, Implementation Lead, or equivalent

• Operationally rigorous. Strong track record of delivering against customer needs not activity-shaped ("I ran the program") but outcome-shaped ("the customer got X and here's specifically how I made it land")

• Has personally owned a customer's outcome end-to-end at an enterprise account not just "contributed to" or "supported"

• Communicates with precision across levels. Same person can hold the engineer