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Google

Customer Engineering Manager II, SMB, Google Cloud

$152K - $222K Austin, TX, US Mid Posted June 09, 2026

Role Description

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Atlanta, GA, USA; Austin, TX, USA.### Minimum qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • 10 years of experience with cloud native architecture in a customer-facing or support role.
  • Experience with cloud engineering, on-premise engineering, virtualization, or containerization platforms.
  • Experience with technical conversations, demos, prototyping, or workshops with customers.
  • Leadership experience (e.g., people management, team lead, mentorship, coaching).

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience with software lifecycles, building tools, and architecting/developing software for scalable, distributed systems (e.g., data platform, AI/ML, infrastructure).
  • Experience as a pre-sales manager or technical customer-facing people manager within a professional services or sales engineering team.
  • Experience managing a team through pre-sales processes and career development (e.g., account mapping, quota setting, performance management, managing sensitive information).
  • Experience engaging with, and presenting to, technical stakeholders/executive leaders (e.g., delivering compelling messages by audience, asking strategic questions, leading conversations that drive accelerated value realization and business opportunity).
  • Experience driving delivery and consumption plans for complex, cross-pillar cloud solutions.

About the job -----------------

As a SMB Customer Engineering (CE) Manager, you will lead and deploy a team of subject matter experts responsible for working alongside customers to provide trusted technical and solution advice to accelerate workload migration and remove technical blockers. You will foster a culture of technical ownership and understand the mechanics of architecture, delivery, and consumption across the Google Cloud portfolio.

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $152000 - $222000 (USD) + 42.86% bonus target + bonus + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.Responsibilities --------------------

* Lead a team of customer engineers focusing on team culture, talent strategy, and skills development to deliver successful cloud transformation outcomes for customers and accelerate value realization. * Foster customer partnership and provide thought leadership related to cloud, cross-pillar solutions, and expansion opportunities to drive technical wins. * Partner with Sales to define technical go-to-market strategies and delivery plans, with a focus on winning new workloads and driving consumption within existing ones. Through planning stages, determine alignment, coverage, and staffing needs. * Balance technical leadership with operational excellence; lead workload and opportunity review meetings and provide insight into how to achieve a technical agreement and migration strategy, work directly with customers, partners, and prospects. * Work cross-functionally across Google, partners, and the team to resolve technical roadblocks. Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.

About Forward Deployed Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.

Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.

Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.

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