Forward Deployed Engineer/Practice Lead

Job Description :

Position : Forward Deployed Engineer/Practice Lead

Location : Hyderabad, India

Work Model : Fully Onsite 5 Days/Week

Employment Type : Full-Time

Experience : 12+ years

Shift Timings : 6 PM to 3 AM IST

Company Name : Zion Cloud Solutions Executive Leadership

About the Role :

Zion Cloud Solutions is building a dedicated Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Hyderabad, focused on solving complex customer problems using AI, data, and cloud technologies.

We are seeking a business and technology leader to build and fully own this new organisation. The role will initially lead a team of 8 - 10 Forward Deployed Engineers and will own the P&L end-to-end, including hiring, training, customer relationships, technical direction, delivery, and growth.

This is not a traditional engineering-management role. The successful candidate must combine commercial ownership, technical credibility, and customer-facing leadership.

Business and P&L Ownership :

- Own the FDE business unit's revenue, margins, utilisation, costs, headcount, and profitability.

- Develop business plans, budgets, forecasts, pricing, and capacity plans.

- Partner with US leadership on pipeline development, proposals, resource planning, and growth.

- Ensure engagements are appropriately scoped, staffed, and commercially healthy.

Team and Capability Building :

- Recruit, train, and lead an initial team of 8 - 10 Forward Deployed Engineers.

- Define the team structure, required skills, performance expectations, and career paths.

- Establish an FDE operating model covering discovery, architecture, prototyping, deployment, productionization, and handoff.

- Build a culture of ownership, speed, accountability, technical excellence, and customer focus.

Customer and Delivery Leadership :

- Work directly with customers to understand ambiguous business problems and translate them into practical technical solutions.

- Lead strategic customer discussions, solutioning, estimates, proposals, and executive escalations.

- Own delivery performance and ensure projects achieve measurable business and technical outcomes.

- Identify opportunities to expand customer engagements and generate additional revenue.

- Establish metrics for quality, utilisation, productivity, customer satisfaction, margins, and delivery timelines.

Technical Leadership :

- Provide direction across GCP, Gemini, Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, security, and DevOps.

- Review architectures and guide critical technical decisions.

- Establish reusable frameworks, reference architectures, and delivery accelerators.

- Ensure solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, maintainable, and commercially viable.

Preferred Skills :

- 12+ years of experience in technology consulting, enterprise software, AI, cloud, or digital transformation.

- Experience building and scaling an engineering, consulting, or professional-services team.

- Demonstrated P&L ownership, including revenue, margins, utilisation, and workforce planning.

- Strong enterprise customer-facing, solutioning, and delivery-leadership experience.

- Experience supporting pre-sales, pricing, proposals, estimates, and commercial discussions.

- Strong understanding of cloud, data, AI, and modern software engineering.

- Ability to lead teams in fast-moving environments with unclear or evolving customer requirements.

- Experience working with distributed US and India teams.

- Google Cloud and Generative AI experience is strongly preferred.

Skills

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud Infrastructure, AI Integration, Google Cloud Platform, Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, Forward Deployment Engineering