Role Description
Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 10 years of experience with cloud native architecture in a customer-facing or support role.
- 3 years of experience as a Pre-Sales Manager or a people manager in a technical customer-facing role within a Sales Engineering team.
- 3 years of experience in leadership (e.g., people management, team lead, mentorship, or coaching).
- Ability to travel up to 50% of the time.
Preferred qualifications:
- 2 years of experience supporting or selling to state, county, local municipal agencies, and academic institutions.
- Experience with software life-cycles, building tools, and architecting and developing software for scalable, distributed systems, including data platform, AI/ML (including Generative AI) and infrastructure.
- Experience managing a team through sales processes, operations and career development, including account mapping, quota setting, quarterly/annual performance management, and managing sensitive information.
- Experience presenting to technical stakeholders and executive leaders, including delivering compelling messages by audience, asking strategic questions, and leading conversations that drive business opportunity.
About the job -----------------
In this role, you lead customer engineering teams and deploy a team of subject matter experts responsible for working alongside our customers to provide trusted technical and solution advice to accelerate workload migration and remove technical impediments.
Google Public Sector brings the magic of Google to the mission of government and education with solutions purpose-built for enterprises. We focus on helping United States public sector institutions accelerate their digital transformations, and we continue to make significant investments and grow our team to meet the complex needs of local, state and federal government and educational institutions.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $192,000-$267,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.Responsibilities --------------------
* Lead a team of Customer Engineers and build a thriving growth culture. Focus on talent strategy and skills development to deliver on cloud transformation outcomes for our customers and accelerate business goals for your territory. * Foster strong partnerships with key customers across the book of business. Provide leadership related to cloud, transformation and relevant industry trends. * Partner with Google Cloud Sales leadership to define technical go-to-market strategies and execution plan for the team's book of business. * 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, working directly with our customers, partners, and prospects. * Work cross-functionally across Google, our partners, and your team to resolve technical roadblocks including capacity needs, constraints and product challenges affecting customer satisfaction. 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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