Role Overview

As a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer Manager, you will lead and scale a team of senior technical experts who define technical strategy across major customer engagements and deliver lighthouse implementations with strategic customers. You'll build and develop a high-performing FDE organization, establish standards for how your teams operate, influence product direction through aggregated field insights, and serve as both a people leader and executive technical advisor to customers and internal stakeholders. This role uniquely combines engineering leadership with deep technical fluency in AI and automation, strategic customer engagement, and organizational scaling.

Unlike traditional engineering managers who oversee product development teams, Principal FDE Managers lead engineers embedded in customer environments, balancing team development, delivery excellence, and customer outcomes simultaneously. You'll shape how your team delivers agentic automation solutions while owning hiring, performance, career development, and the operational health of a team responsible for UiPath's most strategic customer engagements.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership & Team Development

Recruit, hire, and retain top-tier Forward Deployed Engineering talent, building a team with the technical depth and customer acumen required for strategic engagements. Develop Senior and Principal FDEs through coaching, career planning, and targeted stretch opportunities that prepare them for technical and leadership progression. Set clear performance expectations, deliver candid feedback, and manage performance issues with fairness and rigor. Foster a team culture that values technical excellence, customer empathy, rapid learning, and collaborative problem-solving. Create development paths that accommodate both individual contributor and management tracks, ensuring the team retains its strongest technical talent.

AI Engineering & Platform Mastery

Set the technical direction for the team across major customer engagements, ensuring Senior and Principal FDEs apply strong judgment in AI system design, multi-agent orchestration, and enterprise deployment. Translate customer and field learnings into actionable input for Product and Engineering, while driving adoption of reference architectures, reusable delivery patterns, and engineering standards across the team. Establish consistent practices for agent engineering, prompt management, LLM evaluation, and production operations, and guide the team in balancing experimentation with standardization as new technologies emerge. Ensure solutions delivered by the team meet strong standards for performance, cost efficiency, security, and operational sustainability across customer environments.

Technical Excellence, Innovation & Delivery

Set and uphold the technical standards by which the team delivers AI systems, agentic workflows, and production-ready customer solutions. Guide lighthouse engagements through strong technical oversight and escalation support, while driving cross-functional improvements that increase delivery quality, repeatability, and scale. Convert patterns emerging across customer work into reusable practices, stronger operating mechanisms, and informed product feedback. Ensure field learnings are captured and shared in ways that strengthen the broader FDE organization and elevate the team's technical capabilities.

Customer & Business Impact

Set customer technology strategy across a portfolio of strategic engagements, aligning delivery to business transformation goals and measurable value realization. Guide teams through lighthouse implementations that validate emerging agentic capabilities and scale successful patterns across accounts. Synthesize field learnings into structured product and roadmap input, shaping how UiPath evolves to meet customer and market needs. Develop senior executive relationships with key customers, serving as a trusted advisor on AI, automation, and transformation priorities. Drive consistent methods for measuring, articulating, and expanding customer business impact. Partner across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success to resolve recurring customer challenges.

Collaboration, Influence & Leadership

Drive cross-functional collaboration across teams, regions, and technical disciplines to align execution on strategic customer priorities and lighthouse programs. Connect field execution with Product and Engineering, ensuring customer insight is translated into product direction and stronger co-innovation outcomes. Coach Senior FDEs and emerging leaders in technical leadership, architectural problem-solving, and executive customer engagement. Establish alignment on technical standards, delivery approaches, and field strategy across teams. Provide clear upward and lateral leadership, surfacing risks early and stepping in to resolve execution and technical issues.

Required Qualifications
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience leading customer-facing technical teams in enterprise software environments
• Deep expertise in LLM systems, including prompt engineering, evaluation methodologies, and production deployment of agentic workflows at scale
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript, with hands-on experience guiding the development of production-grade AI applications
• Proven track record of leading technical strategy, driving execution across complex multi-system integrations, and delivering measurable business outcomes for enterprise customers
• Experience managing teams responsible for lighthouse implementations, strategic accounts, or high-impact technical initiatives
• Strong people leadership skills, including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and developing senior technical talent
• Track record of establishing technical standards, delivery best practices, and operational rigor across teams
• Willingness to travel to customer sites (up to 30-40%) and lead engagements directly in customer environments

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience with enterprise automation platforms.
• Background in machine learning, including familiarity with custom ML models, document understanding, or AI Center-style deployments
• Familiarity with multiple LLM providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and others, with an understanding of model selection tradeoffs across enterprise use cases
• Experience with orchestration platforms, workflow engines, and integration architectures in complex enterprise environments
• Track record of driving technical adoption and delivery excellence across customer implementations in enterprise software

What Makes This Role Special
• Strategic Impact: Define technical strategy for UiPath's most important customer engagements and influence the product roadmap through direct customer insights
• Cutting-Edge Technology: Work at the forefront of AI and agentic automation, implementing solutions that push the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs and enterprise automation
• Organizational Leadership: Establish standards and best practices that shape how the entire FDE organization delivers customer solutions
• Customer Partnership: Build executive relationships with strategic customers and serve as their trusted advisor on AI and automation strategy
• Measurable Business Outcomes: See the direct impact of your work through deployed automations that save millions of dollars and transform how enterprises operate
• Innovation at Scale: Co-create technical capabilities with Product and Engineering that unlock new use cases for customers across industries
• Thought Leadership: Represent UiPath at industry conferences and establish yourself as a recognized expert in AI-driven enterprise automation

Our Core Priorities

At UiPath, we're guided by key business priorities that shape how Principal FDE Managerss work:
• Customer Centric: You'll be embedded directly with customers, making their success the foundation of your daily work
• Breaking Silos: Operate at the intersection of customer organizations and UiPath teams, facilitating collaboration across all stakeholders
• Improving Agility: Prototype rapidly, iterate based on real-world feedback, and embrace the principle that shipping is how we learn
• Dealing with Ambiguity: Navigate unclear requirements, non-deterministic AI systems, and unpredictable field conditions with confidence
• Building Focus: Prioritize high-impact use cases that deliver measurable business value and ensure solutions achieve depth and reliability

#LI-MH1

Maybe you don't tick all the boxes above-but still think you'd be great for the job? Go ahead, apply anyway. Please. Because we know that experience comes in all shapes and sizes-and passion can't be learned.

Many of our roles allow for flexibility in when and where work gets done. Depending on the needs of the business and the role, the number of hybrid, office-based, and remote workers will vary from team to team. Applications are assessed on a rolling basis and there is no fixed deadline for this requisition. The application window may change depending on the volume of applications received or may close immediately if a qualified candidate is selected.