Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

Nexus Cognitive

Engagement Manager handling solution delivery and technical operations for NX1's strategic accounts. Managing customer relationships and ensuring successful outcomes with a portfolio of accounts.

Posted 6/2/2026full-timeAtlanta • 🇺🇸 United StatesMid-LevelSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Cloud

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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.
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.
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.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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

Benefits

Comp & perks

Collaborative team culture built on curiosity and respect
Challenging work where your contributions clearly matter
Leadership team that invests in learning and development
Opportunity to work at the intersection of cloud, data, and AI innovation

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

solution deliverycustomer requirements translationgross margin managementP&L managementoutcome deliveryprogram managementarchitecture documentationdata infrastructurecloud infrastructureplatform infrastructure

Soft Skills

operational rigorprecise communicationproblem ownershipstructured thinkingexecutive presencewritten clarityhigh agencybidirectional translationcustomer relationship managementconsulting mindset