Sr. Deployment Strategist, FDE Digital Native Business

CSQ427R137

About the team:

The FDE (Forward Deployed Engineering) team is a new strategic initiative sponsored by the CEO and Founders. Our mission is to win C-suite-sponsored high-value AI opportunities by selling and delivering outcomes not just a platform. You will be part of the founding team embedded with our most strategic customers from the very first sales call through to a production-ready solution.

You will be the product manager for the customers problem responsible for the why and what while our FDEs (Engineers) will be your partners responsible for the how.

Role description:

As a Deployment Strategist (DS) you are the critical bridge between a customers multi-million-dollar business problem and Databricks technical solution. You are a product manager for the field owning the technical and product direction of the engagement from initial discovery through production launch and will build C-suite trust perform deep discovery to map the customers political and technical landscape and scope the value.

You will define the Minimum Viable Product for a pilot write the PRD that guides the engineering team and manage the project to a successful landing. You will also lead technical discovery shape solution architecture with FDEs and ensure that each proposed solution can move from prototype to production.

This role requires a rare combination of executive presence deep product thinking technical depth and a hands-on delivery mindset.

The impact you will have:

• C-Suite Scoping & Value Definition: Partner with Sales to perform deep discovery map the customers organization quantify the business value of $10M problems and define the pilot including its MVP success criteria and timeline.
• End-to-End Product Ownership: Author the PRD prioritize the engineering backlog manage scope and act as the primary hands-on QA tester. Translate business requirements into clear data integration security and operational requirements that engineers can build against.
• Technical Solution Leadership & Delivery: Drive the FDE build team through an agile delivery process manage stakeholders from the C-suite to individual engineers and unblock technical or organizational issues. Lead technical discovery and design reviews. Understand the customers data flows integrations platform constraints and operational environment; pressure-test architecture choices; and identify technical risks early.
• Solution Launch & Landing: Own the Day 0 launch manage the war room and drive the solution from launch to full adoption by capturing user feedback iterating and proving the defined business value. Own production readiness across data quality testing security performance and operations. Work with the team to diagnose issues and drive them to resolution.
• Strategic Handoff & Growth: Scope the ongoing maintenance plan create customer documentation/training and leverage your trusted advisor status to identify the next high-value FDE engagement. Codify reusable solution patterns and bring field insights back to Product and Engineering.

What we look for:

• Executive Presence & Communication: You are a trusted advisor with strong executive presence and excellent communication skills. You are confident and humble can build rapport quickly and can help senior stakeholders make difficult decisions.
• Product Judgment & Delivery: You can define what to build and why write strong product requirements prioritize engineering work manage scope and lead complex agile software projects from an ambiguous problem to a measurable outcome.
• Technical Fluency & Architecture Judgment: You understand modern data and AI architectures including cloud platforms data pipelines data models distributed systems APIs security and governance machine learning and generative AI application patterns. You can lead architecture discussions evaluate trade-offs and pressure-test technical decisions.
• Hands-on Technical Ability: You are proficient in at least one language such as Python Java or SQL. You can explore data work in notebooks read and review code and pipelines build or adapt prototypes and contribute meaningfully to troubleshooting.
• Relevant Experience: Typically 7 years of experience delivering complex customer-facing data analytics AI or software engagements or equivalent experience as a founder or technical builder. You have helped deliver data machine learning or generative AI systems into production and understand the integration operational and adoption challenges that appear in real environments. Experience in a high-growth technology company forward-deployed organization or leading consultancy is valuable. You enjoy working onsite with customers (often 25-50% sometimes higher) to drive delivery.