A Senior Forward Deployed Engineering Manager (Senior FDE Manager) leads multiple pods of FDEs across several strategic enterprise customers, defining the delivery model, engineering standards, and talent strategy for the FDE practice at scale.
Senior FDE Managers own organizational-level outcomes — they set the technical direction across multiple concurrent customer programs, build and scale the FDE team, and drive the mechanisms that ensure consistent engineering excellence and measurable business impact across the entire portfolio.
Senior FDE Managers operate at org-level scope.
They lead 15–30+ engineers, influence technical decisions across multiple customer engagements and AWS teams simultaneously, and define what "great" looks like for forward-deployed AI engineering management.
They represent the FDE practice to AWS senior leadership and customer C-suite executives, balancing strategic vision with operational execution.
Key job responsibilities
- Lead delivery across multiple customer engagements and FDE pods, defining engagement models, staffing strategies, and delivery cadences that ensure consistent engineering quality across all active programs.
- Set the technical direction for complex customer AI programs, aligning strategy with adjacent AWS teams and bringing technology and industry context to business decisions across your organization.
- Define operational standards, evaluation frameworks, and production readiness criteria for AI systems, establishing mechanisms that keep systems healthy and performing across all engagements.
- Hire, develop, and retain FDE talent across your organization, coaching managers on performance management, succession planning, and career development to build a strong and sustainable talent pipeline.
- Identify systemic opportunities to expand AI adoption across customer organizations, creating reusable accelerators and feeding patterns back into AWS product roadmaps. A day in the life
You might start the morning reviewing delivery metrics across your FDE pods before joining an architecture review for a customer's AI program.
By mid-morning, you are on a call with a customer executive and an AWS account team aligning on next-quarter priorities.
After lunch, you coach one of your FDE managers through a staffing decision for a new engagement, then shift to drafting a proposal for a reusable platform component your team identified across multiple customer deployments.
You close the day preparing for a talent review, evaluating growth plans for rising engineers across your organization.
10047 About the team
The Forward Deployed Engineering team within AWS works directly alongside enterprise customers to turn AI ambitions into production systems.
We sit at the boundary between AWS services and real-world customer environments, which means our engineers solve problems that product teams have not yet encountered.
We are building an inclusive engineering culture where leaders are empowered to shape how AWS delivers AI at scale.
If you want to define what great looks like for forward-deployed engineering and grow an organization that has a direct line to customer impact, we would love to talk.