Sr Manager, Forward Deployment Engineer

T-Mobile T-Mobile · Telecom · Bellevue, WA +1

T-Mobile is seeking a Sr Manager, Forward Deployment Engineering to lead a practice that embeds engineers within business units to ship production agentic AI solutions. The role involves managing multiple FDE pods, overseeing technical guidance, cross-pod coordination, senior stakeholder management, practice health, and pod performance, with a focus on delivering validated ROI and adhering to responsible AI and data security standards. Requires a strong technical background in AI/ML, particularly LLM deployment patterns, and experience managing managers and senior stakeholders.

What you'd actually do

  1. Technical Guidance & Strategic Presence: Accountable for the technical quality of what the practice ships. Guide direction on high-stakes agentic AI delivery decisions, architectural trade-offs, and cross-domain patterns. Stay close enough to pod teams to hold technical credibility and catch systemic delivery issues before they become domain failures. Ensure responsible AI and data security standards are embedded in practice-level delivery.
  2. Cross-Pod Coordination & Resource Management: Accountable for the practice having the right people in the right domains. Own allocation and domain assignment planning across pods, identify resourcing imbalances early, and manage headcount planning and the hiring pipeline in coordination with BU leaders and the Sr Director.
  3. Senior BU Relationship Management: Accountable for BU leadership trusting the practice with their hardest problems. Serve as the senior point of contact at the Director and VP level — escalating structural blockers, negotiating domain prioritization, aligning the FDE roadmap with BU strategic objectives, and representing validated ROI outcomes in senior leadership forums
  4. Practice Health & Delivery Standards: Accountable for the long-term health of the practice itself. Own practice-level metrics — aggregate ROI, FDE retention, domain assignment health, delivery quality — and set the responsible AI, data security, and privacy standards every FDE deliverable is held to. Partner with TPMs and CoE leadership to keep requirements intake and delivery handoffs running effectively.
  5. FDE Pod Performance: Accountable for every pod in the practice delivering validated ROI and growing the people in it. Directly manage FDE pods across multiple BU stakeholders — coaching, performance feedback, and career development — with visibility into each pod's delivery health, ROI performance, and team morale through structured check-ins and regular engagement.

Skills

Required

  • Hands-on production engineering foundation
  • Track record of leading technical teams to measurable business outcomes in ambiguous delivery environments
  • Technically fluent
  • Familiarity with LLM deployment patterns including RAG architecture, prompt orchestration, and multi-agent system design
  • Exposure to agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar)
  • Exposure to cloud-native infrastructure (AWS primary)
  • Demonstrated experience managing other people managers: coaching manager effectiveness, diagnosing team health through an indirect layer, and holding managers accountable for their teams' outcomes
  • Able to own relationships with BU Director and VP-level stakeholders; communicates practice performance, delivery risks, and strategic recommendations at the executive level
  • Experience driving outcomes across CoE engineering, BU operations, HR, and Finance without direct authority over those functions
  • Able to manage headcount, domain assignment cycles, hiring pipelines, and resource allocation decisions that keep multiple pods staffed and performing simultaneously
  • Sets practice-level standards for responsible AI delivery including data privacy, security, and ethical AI guidelines
  • Partners with compliance functions to ensure FDE solutions meet T-Mobile's data governance requirements across all domain assignments

Nice to have

  • Master's Degree
  • building or scaled a forward deployment, solutions engineering, or embedded technical practice
  • managing multi-domain programs with rotating team or project structures
  • Working knowledge of MCP and A2A agent communication standards

What the JD emphasized

  • production agentic AI solutions
  • agentic AI delivery decisions
  • responsible AI and data security standards
  • validated ROI
  • managing managers
  • Senior Stakeholder Management
  • Responsible AI & Risk Management

Other signals

  • shipping production agentic AI solutions
  • leading multiple FDE pods
  • building and deploying real agentic solutions
  • validated ROI
  • managing managers