Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

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 2–4 strategic NX1 accounts, $5–10M 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 accelerate 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 5–8 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's whiteboard conversation, the VP‑level steering committee, and the C‑suite QBR without changing who they are — only the register Bidirectional translator. Has owned the act of translating customer requirements into something the engineering org can actually build, and engineering trade‑offs into something the customer's exec team can actually decide on Problem ownership mindset. Reflex when something breaks is to own it until it's not, regardless of whose "job" it is Consulting EM intrinsics paired with founding mindset. Carries the structural muscle of a top‑tier consulting engagement manager (McKinsey / BCG / Bain / Palantir lineage — client management, structured thinking, exec presence, written clarity) and the entrepreneurial streak of a founder — builds the playbook rather than follows one Has worked inside a startup or scale‑up engineering organization (Series A through D) — knows what it looks like to operate when the org chart is still being drawn Fluent enough technically to read an architecture doc, ask the right questions, and not need a translator in an engineering room. Data, cloud, or platform infrastructure background strongly preferred Has run modern program tooling — Linear and Notion specifically, or has switched to them from Jira/Asana/Confluence and can articulate why Strong written communication. Status updates that move decisions. Postmortems people read. Memos that change minds High agency. Will close their own loops, will not wait for someone else to define the playbook, will push back constructively when the company is wrong Strong differentiators Has worked at Palantir (FDE), Anthropic / OpenAI (FDE / Solutions), Databricks (Field Eng / CE), Stripe (Implementation / Solutions), Ramp / Mercury (Solutions), Scale AI (FDE), or a comparable forward‑deployed environment Has carried direct gross margin or P&L responsibility on accounts — not just hit milestones Engineering background somewhere in their history (CS degree, eng IC role, or a credible technical foundation built on the job) Has been the person who wrote the playbook, not just executed someone else’s Why You’ll Love Working at Nexus At Nexus, we value people who want to grow — and support each other while doing so. You can expect: A collaborative team culture built on curiosity and respect Challenging work where your contributions clearly matter A leadership team that invests in learning and development The opportunity to work at the intersection of cloud, data, and AI innovation Ready to Apply? If this role sounds like a great fit — or even close to one — we’d love to hear from you. We know that no candidate checks every single box, and we’re excited to meet people who bring curiosity, talent, and a desire to build meaningful work together. #J-18808-Ljbffr Nexus Cognitive Technologies