Forward Deployed Engagement Manager

About Nexus

We’re the converged data platform for the AI era—composable by design, built on an open‑source foundation, and AI‑native from the ground up. One identity, one governance envelope, one operational layer across every mainframe, data lake, warehouse, and streaming system in the business. For the first time, enterprises can bring their existing stack along instead of rebuilding it—and still give AI agents full context across the estate. Our platform processes credit risk data for 90%+ of US small businesses (40M+ customers) every month, delivers intent signals for 300M+ subscribers monthly for Africa’s largest telco, and powers the data and AI layer for a top‑3 US bank. We’re 100+ people across the US and India, headquartered in Atlanta, and we triple revenue year over year.

Role Summary

The person who owns whether NX1 delivers for a customer—from the moment they sign on. This is the delivery and technical operations owner at a portfolio of NX1’s strategic accounts, not a project manager or CSM. The role involves translating the customer’s business problem into tangible requirements for our platform, designing the engagement around that solution, and driving it to landing so the customer is winning. Everything else—program mechanics, executive presence, margin, documentation—is in service of that solution landing.

What You’ll Own

Account Ownership, Delivery, and Gross Margin

• Manage a portfolio of 2–4 strategic NX1 accounts, each generating USD 5–10 million in delivery / managed services revenue
• Own gross‑margin management for the portfolio: cost‑to‑serve per account, scope discipline, hero‑engineer attrition risk, and non‑generalizable custom work
• Drive the P&L for those accounts, surface risk before it appears on dashboards, and manage margin alongside deliverables
• Maintain executive relationships so the VP of Data / CDO / CTO knows you by name and sees you as a peer, not a vendor
• Shape renewal and expansion strategy in partnership with the CRO; you set the conditions under which the customer grows, without carrying quota

Program & Delivery Operations

• Stand up the delivery program on day 1 of a new engagement, creating roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, governance, and communication cadence
• Run the weekly operating rhythm—internal stand‑ups, customer syncs, executive readouts, and escalation reviews—and build artifacts that keep teams grounded in reality, not theater
• Own the documentation surface for each engagement, including program plans, decision logs, RAID registers, executive status, runbooks, and the customer‑facing roadmap view
• Design how Linear and Notion are used for your portfolio rather than inheriting a template others built

Technical Quarterbacking & Requirements Translation

• Serve as the bidirectional translator between the customer’s business problem and NX1’s engineering reality, surfacing the right requirements and engineering trade‑offs without distortion
• Build requirements together with the customer in conversation, with the depth provided by Solution Architects and FDEs when needed
• Hold the line on technical commitments—distinguishing scope, roadmap asks, and one‑off custom builds that engagements cannot absorb
• Create concise one‑page summaries for the customer’s CTO and the engineering team, distilling architecture documents and key insights

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 a customer‑health signal that detects problems 60 days before they become escalations, using usage trajectory, executive sentiment, milestone slippage, support ticket patterns, and roadmap dependency drift
• Run quarterly business reviews that the customer’s executive team deems the most useful meeting of the quarter
• Translate customer pain back into product roadmap input and close the loop when it lands

Commercial Partnership

• Partner with the CRO on expansion conversations, combining technical credibility with commercial framing
• Hold the cost‑to‑serve number for engagements, distinguishing managed‑service scope, paid one‑offs, and roadmap asks
• Spot early churn signals and elevate them before they solidify
• Write the renewal narrative—substantive detailing what was delivered, what changed for the customer, and what’s next—rather than a deck for the CRO

Build the Function

• Define the engagement playbook for NX1; codify successful practices into reusable artifacts for future FDEMs
• Influence the operating model across Forward Engineering, MSO, and Sales by clarifying handoffs, ownership, and phase responsibilities

Qualifications

• 5–8 years in a customer‑facing solution delivery, consulting, or forward‑deployed role (e.g., Engagement Manager, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineering Lead, Implementation Lead, or equivalent)
• Operational rigor with a track record of delivering on customer outcome—focused on results rather than activity
• Direct ownership of a customer’s end‑to‑end outcome at an enterprise account
• Clear, level‑appropriate communication—engage engineers on the whiteboard, VPs on steering, and C‑suite on QBRs with consistent register
• Bidirectional translator who turns customer requirements into actionable engineering standpoints and conversely translates engineering trade‑offs into executive‐digestible decisions
• Problem ownership mindset: take ownership until a solution is fully achieved, regardless of who “owns the job”
• Consulting‑EM instincts paired with a founder’s drive—build the playbook instead of following one
• Experience in a startup or scale‑up engineering organization (Series A‑D) with a focus on agile, growing structures
• Technical fluency to read architecture documents, ask relevant questions, and operate without a translator—preferably in data, cloud, or platform infrastructure
• Proficiency with modern program tooling—Linear and Notion (or ability to articulate transition from Jira/Asana/Confluence)
• Strong written communication: status updates that move decisions, postmortems that are read, and concise memos that can change minds
• High agency—close loops independently, push back constructively, and avoid waiting for others to define the playbook

Strong Differentiators

• Prior work at Palantir, Anthropic/OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Ramp/Mercury, Scale AI, or a comparable forward‑deployed environment
• Direct gross‑margin or P&L responsibility on accounts
• Engineering background (CS degree, IC role, or strong technical foundation built in the job)
• Authored the playbook rather than merely executing one

Why You’ll Love Working at Nexus

• 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.