Forward Deployed Team Lead – Career Development Office | MIT Sloan School of Management

Questions? Visit the CDO Welcome Desk or email us at askcdo@mit.edu. | CDO Welcome Desk Hours: Mon-Thurs, 9am-5pm; Fri, 9am-4pm | The Virtual Interview Room is available for bookings!

C3 .ai

Forward Deployed Team Lead

• Share This: Click to share on Facebook Click to share on LinkedIn Click to share on Twitter
• Copy Link

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.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future company sponsorship.