Manager - Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Gurgaon, India

Department: Product

Experience: 6-9

• Studio AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0_CsQpCbwg
• Vini AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFjhPWp6gJU

• A tiered FDE service model: which dealer requests are standard config, which require custom logic, and which need product-level input — with clear escalation paths for each.
• A configuration QA process: every custom workflow gets tested against real conversation scenarios before going live with a dealer.
• An AI quality review programme — FDEs regularly audit live conversations for tone, accuracy, escalation behaviour, and brand compliance.
• A configuration knowledge base: documented patterns, reusable templates, and common customisation recipes that reduce per-dealer effort over time.
• A technical discovery framework used at the start of every complex dealer engagement to surface requirements, constraints, and risks early.

• Build and lead the FDE team from the ground up: hire engineers who have the rare mix of technical depth and customer-facing judgment that this role demands.
• Define what great looks like for an FDE at Spyne - the deployment standards, quality thresholds, and customer interaction expectations - and hold the team to them.
• Write the FDE playbook: onboarding process, configuration templates, escalation protocols, and the tribal knowledge that currently lives in individual heads.
• Run weekly deployment reviews. Know the status of every live dealer in the team's portfolio - what's working, what's stalling, and where you need to step in.
• Develop FDEs from reactive troubleshooters into engineers who anticipate failure, improve product, and grow accounts without being asked.

• Own the most complex dealer accounts yourself: enterprise groups, multi-rooftop deployments, integrations with non-standard DMS or telephony stacks, and accounts where a previous deployment has failed.
• Join strategic sales calls and demos as the technical authority for Vini - the person who answers the questions an AE cannot and who makes a sceptical GM trust the product before they sign.
• Personally lead go-lives for high-stakes accounts. When a dealer insists on a person on-site, you are that person.
• Handle critical escalations: a live deployment that breaks, a conversation quality collapse, an integration that stops syncing. You diagnose, fix, and debrief.

• Own the formal channel between field reality and Product. Every pattern your team sees across deployments - config gaps, recurring failures, features dealers keep requesting - gets translated into well-scoped engineering input.
• Sit in product prioritisation and push for fixes that unblock deployment or improve conversation quality. You are not a passive reporter - you advocate for your dealers.
• Define and track the metrics that prove Vini is working: time-to-autopilot, answer rate, booking conversion, conversation quality scores. Use them to drive product decisions, not just report them.
• Build the internal knowledge base that lets the team share what they learn - prompt patterns that work, integration quirks by DMS vendors, dealer-type-specific configuration approaches.

• Set the QA standard for every deployment: no dealer goes to autopilot without passing the call quality review your team defines.
• Monitor live deployments proactively. Catch performance drops before the dealer does.
• Expand accounts - move dealers from one workflow to three, from one rooftop to a group - by proving Vini handles the calls they were nervous about.

• 6+ years as an FDE, solutions engineer, implementation engineer, or technical account manager - with meaningful time in front of customers. You have shipped technical deployments and sat across from a frustrated customer and fixed their problem live.
• You have led or mentored a small technical team - and you know the difference between being the best individual contributor in the room and being the person who makes everyone around them better.
• Deep comfort with voice AI or conversational AI specifically: prompt engineering, intent design, call flow logic, latency and interruption handling, transfer behaviour. You know where these systems fail and why.
• Fluency with APIs, CRM/DMS integrations, telephony systems, and log-reading. You debug without waiting for the engineering team and you file issues engineers want to pick up.
• Product sense sharp enough to look at a week of dealer complaints and separate config problems from training problems from real product gaps - and write the latter up in a way that gets prioritised.
• The range to talk to a dealership GM and a Spyne backend engineer in the same hour and be trusted by both.
• Willingness to work US-overlapping hours and travel to the US regularly - sometimes for a week at a time during a go-live or a critical dealer escalation.
• A bias toward outcome ownership. When a deployment stalls under your team, you do not reassign it. You find out why and you fix it.

• Hands-on prompt engineering experience with LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, or similar).
• Automotive, dealer tech, or field service background.
• Experience with agentic AI workflows — tool use, multi-step reasoning, handoffs.
• Familiarity with conversation analytics and quality scoring methodologies.

• Ownership A new business to build from scratch - not a department to manage. Yours to define, prove, and scale.
• Autonomy Full freedom to operate like a founder, backed by Spyne’s platform, customers, and capital.
• Equity Meaningful equity reflecting a founding business leader role, structured for long-term wealth creation.
• Trajectory Clear path from EIR to Business Head with full P&L ownership as the business scales.