Forward Deployed Engineering Manager

The Role

We have thousands of enterprise users, proven product-market fit across digital shelf analytics, retail media, and sales operations, and the Fortune 100 running on our platform. That part works. Now we are building something new: autonomous AI agents that are already in customer hands and scaling fast. This is a 0-to-1 build inside a company that has the distribution, the data, and the customers to make it real.

The AI Labs team operates as a startup within the company. It needs its own engineering leader. Someone who can recruit a world-class team in CIQ, set the technical direction for agentic AI in commerce, and ship at a pace that matches the opportunity. We have engineering teams across the US, India, Canada, and the UK. Mountain View is the center of gravity for AI leadership.

This role reports directly to the Founders. We ship with Claude, GPT-4, and open-source models in production. Our engineers already write the majority of code with AI. Some things are great. Some things need to be rebuilt. The next leader will know the difference.

What You Will Do

Deploy AI Solutions with Customers

• Work directly with enterprise customers to implement AI agents and workflows across content, media, and sales use cases
• Customize and adapt CommerceIQ’s platform to fit real-world customer environments
• Drive rapid iteration cycles based on customer feedback and usage

Bridge Customer Needs with Product & Engineering

• Translate ambiguous business problems into technical solutions and product requirements
• Provide structured feedback to product and engineering teams to improve core platform capabilities
• Identify patterns across customers and help shape repeatable product features vs one-off solutions

Lead a High-Impact Engineering Pod

• Manage a small team of engineers focused on customer deployments and solutioning
• Ensure high quality of delivery while maintaining speed and adaptability
• Balance hands-on technical software development with ai tools like claude, cursor (~40%) with leadership and stakeholder management

Drive Business Impact

• Understand customer KPIs and ensure deployed solutions drive measurable outcomes
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to customer stakeholders
• Partner with GTM and Customer Success teams to expand and deepen customer value
• Close pilots 

Shape the Future of AI at CommerceIQ

• Bring frontline insights into how AI is used in production
• Influence how CommerceIQ evolves from SaaS to AI-native workflows and agents
• Help define best practices for deploying AI systems at enterprise scale

What We Look For

This is not a caretaker role. We need a builder. Here is what matters:

Builder with Customer Instinct. 

• Experience working in customer-facing engineering, solutions engineering, or consulting roles
• Background in technology consulting, business consulting, or forward deployed engineering
• Ability to operate in ambiguous environments and solve real business problems

AI Product Exposure. 

• LLM-powered features
• AI copilots / assistants
• Workflow automation
• Understanding of how AI systems behave in real-world production environments

Product & Business Thinking. 

• Ability to connect technical solutions to business outcomes
• Strong intuition for what should be productized vs customized
• Experience collaborating closely with product teams
• Business Consulting exp is a must have 

Leadership & Execution. 

• Experience managing engineers or leading small teams
• Ability to drive high-velocity execution in dynamic environments
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders

Why This Role is Unique

• You are closest to the customer problem - not building in isolation
• You influence both product direction and customer success
• You operate at the intersection of: Engineering, AI, and Business outcomes