Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, Generative AI, Google Cloud

About the job:
As a Manager of a Generative AI (GenAI) Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, you will lead AI/ML engineers who bridge the gap between frontier AI products and production-grade reality within customers. You are responsible for a team that doesn't just consult, but codes, debugs and jointly deploys bespoke agentic solutions directly within customer environments. In this role, you will provide technical mentorship to your team while balancing high-level strategic alignment with product, engineering, and Google Cloud regional sales leadership. Your mission is to empower and unblock your team as they resolve production-level obstacles, including data readiness issues, integration complexities, and state-management challenges that hinder AI from achieving enterprise-grade maturity.

Responsibilities:
Serve as the technical lead, establishing code standards, architectural best practices, and benchmarks to elevate engineering excellence across the team.
Partner with sales and tech Leadership to define requirements for high-value opportunities, deploying specialized experts (MLOps, GenMedia, or Agentic systems) to key accounts.
Lead technical hiring for FDE, evaluating AI/ML expertise, systems engineering, and coding skills to build an exceptional engineering team.
Identify skill gaps in emerging tech (MCP, tool-calling, and foundation models), ensuring the team maintains subject matter expertise in an evolving AI stack.
Collaborate with product and engineering to resolve blockers and translate field insights into road maps while building internal tools to drive organizational efficiency.

Minimum qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8 years of experience in cloud computing or a technical customer-facing role.
2 years of experience managing a software engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), or similar technical customer-facing team in a cloud computing environment.
Experience developing AI/GenAI solutions utilizing AI tools, or designing multi-agent workflows or Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Experience in Python or similar coding language.

Preferred qualifications:
Master’s degree or PhD in AI, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
Experience designing secure, observable multi-agent systems using complex design patterns (e.g., ReAct, self-reflection), state management, and tool-calling protocols.
Experience working with the Public Sector and Education.
Experience designing intuitive interfaces for complex AI and agentic systems, prioritizing context engineering, transparency, and explainability to foster user trust.
Experience architecting AI solutions within complex infrastructures, ensuring data sovereignty and secure governance.
Experience performing discovery interviews to identify business problems and translate complex hardware/AI constraints for C-suites and technical teams.