Forward Deployed Team Leads are senior technical leads who own a commercial or enterprise customer end-to-end. You'll combine strong technical architecture, hands-on coding, product ownership, project management, and stakeholder communication-embedding directly with customers to take our product from "design" to "in production."
You'll own one account at a time: scope the workflow with business and technical stakeholders, design the architecture, write the code that closes the gaps, and drive the deployment through to measurable business value.
Responsibilities- Technical architecture. Own data flow, integration topology, identity model, and deployment architecture across the customer's infrastructure.
- Hands-on coding. Write production code yourself-backend services, data pipelines, APIs, integrations.
- Product ownership. Own the deployment's roadmap. Execute on the statement of work. Decide what's in scope, what's a one-off, and what should become product.
- Project management. Own the plan, milestones, risks, and dependencies. When something slips, know first and flag first.
- Stakeholder communication. Run customer working sessions, brief executive sponsors, and write clean status updates that senior stakeholders will actually read.
- Ship into production. Deploy from dev through UAT into production-including integration with customer data warehouses, ERP/CRM systems, and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Enterprise readiness. Ensure the platform is configured, secured, and monitored to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, data residency, etc.).
- Bridge field back to product. Push field learnings into the core platform so the next deployment is faster.
- Account growth and development. Partner with Sales to identify expansion opportunities within the account-surfacing new use cases, supporting renewal conversations, and ensuring successful deployments convert to long-term customer relationships.
Qualifications- BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- 6+ years shipping production software, with 2+ years as a tech lead or senior individual contributor owning delivery end-to-end.
- Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, Go, or C++.
- Demonstrated ownership of systems taken from zero to production in a commercial or enterprise context.
- Bring deep expertise in at least one vertical (financial services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, or defense) to accelerate time-to-value and credibility with customer stakeholders.
- Experience working directly with business and technical stakeholders at mid-market or enterprise accounts-comfortable in both exec-level conversations and deep technical design sessions.
- Familiarity with enterprise data environments: cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift), REST/GraphQL APIs, and common ERP or CRM platforms.
- Comfort with modern deployment practices: CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), cloud-native services, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent).
Preferred Qualifications- Prior experience as a tech lead or staff engineer at a SaaS or enterprise software vendor with a forward-deployed or professional services motion.
- Experience with AI/ML platform deployments or data-heavy enterprise applications at scale.
- Familiarity with major cloud environments: AWS, Azure, or GCP, including managed ML/AI services.
- Experience in regulated industries (healthcare/life sciences, manufacturing, energy) where compliance and change management are part of the delivery.
- Proven ability to turn a messy, ambiguous customer problem into a clean, repeatable deployment pattern.
C3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan.Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future company sponsorshipC3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan.
Illinois Base Pay Range
$130,000-$194,000 USD
