FDE Practice Lead

Job highlights

• 12+ years in technology consulting or AI with expertise in Google Cloud and Generative AI
• Lead and scale Forward Deployed Engineering team, own P&L, drive customer solutions, and ensure delivery excellence

Position: FDE Practice Lead - Forward Deployed Engineering
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 810 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.

Key Responsibilities:

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 810 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.