Director of Professional Services & Forward Deployed Engineering

SewerAI Corporation is transforming underground infrastructure management through AI-powered inspection and risk analysis. Their platform helps contractors, engineering firms, and utilities unlock valuable insights from sewer inspection data, reducing manual video review time from hours to minutes. After doubling their customer base in the past year, SewerAI is entering a phase of accelerated growth.

Core Responsibilities

Lead and develop the team:

• Manage, coach, and develop Forward Deployed Engineers and Professional Services team members.
• Set clear expectations for project ownership, customer communication, technical quality, and delivery standards.
• Build career paths, operating rhythms, onboarding materials, and performance feedback loops.
• Balance team workload across implementations, integrations, migrations, escalations, and strategic customer work.

Own implementation and delivery execution:

• Oversee customer implementation projects from kickoff through go-live and stabilization.
• Ensure projects have clear scopes, timelines, owners, risks, and success criteria.
• Improve delivery predictability across standard onboarding, custom integrations, data migrations, and customer-specific services.
• Partner with Customer Success, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, and Engineering on handoffs and execution.

Build scalable ProServe systems:

• Create and improve repeatable playbooks, templates, trackers, estimation models, and delivery workflows.
• Define which work should be standard, custom, productized, or escalated to Engineering.
• Improve intake, scoping, prioritization, project tracking, and reporting for services work.
• Identify operational bottlenecks and implement process improvements that increase team leverage.

Drive technical customer outcomes:

• Guide technical discovery and solution design for complex customer deployments.
• Support integrations with CMMS, GIS, inspection platforms, file transfer workflows, and customer data environments.
• Help the team deliver reliable data migrations, configuration work, API-based integrations, and field deployment support.
• Serve as an escalation point for technically complex or high-risk customer projects.

Partner cross-functionally:

• Work with Product and Engineering to surface recurring customer needs, implementation friction, and integration requirements.
• Collaborate with Sales and Solutions Engineering on scoping, pricing inputs, technical feasibility, and customer commitments.
• Partner with Customer Success to ensure customers move from implementation into healthy ongoing adoption.
• Represent ProServe capacity, risks, and delivery tradeoffs in planning conversations.

Business Need

What problem are we solving now? ProServe delivery depends on a small number of people holding context in their heads. Implementations, integrations, migrations, and escalations are routed informally, prioritization happens live in standup rather than through a system, and there is no single owner of delivery quality or team capacity.

Why now? Services volume is growing faster than the team's ability to absorb it through individual effort. Without a manager, every new customer commitment increases the load on the same few people, and the boundaries between ProServe, Product, Engineering, and Sales stay undefined.

What does success unlock? A services function that scales with the business instead of against it — predictable implementations, faster customer time-to-value, and repeatable patterns that feed Product rather than accumulating as one-off custom work.

Success Timeline

30 days:

• Meet every FDE and ProServe contributor one-on-one; understand what each person owns and where context lives that is not written down.
• Map active delivery commitments, the services backlog, and which customers are at risk today.
• Learn the implementation motion end to end: intake, scoping, kickoff, delivery, go-live, handoff.

60 days:

• Establish the team's operating cadence — project reviews, escalation paths, and shared workload visibility.
• Take over prioritization and capacity calls that currently happen ad hoc.
• Identify the top delivery risks and the avoidable custom work driving them.

90 days:

• First process changes in place for intake and scoping, with clear criteria for what is standard, custom, productized, or escalated to Engineering.
• Delivery status legible to Sales, CS, and leadership without the manager having to narrate it.
• A named plan for the highest-impact improvements to delivery consistency.

6 months:

• Improved implementation predictability, project transparency, and cross-functional handoffs.
• Core ProServe workflows standardized across intake, scoping, kickoff, delivery, go-live, and post-launch handoff.
• Stronger mechanisms for managing technical risk, customer escalations, and integration complexity.
• Visible growth in the team's ownership, communication quality, and technical delivery capability.

12 months:

• A scalable ProServe / FDE function that supports growth without relying on heroic one-off efforts.
• Clear service offerings, delivery models, and boundaries between ProServe, Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Improved customer time-to-value alongside high technical quality and team sustainability.
• Repeatable deployment and integration patterns turned into durable internal systems, playbooks, and product feedback loops.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years as a Forward Deployed Engineer, or otherwise in Professional Services, Solutions Engineering, Implementation, Field Engineering, Customer Engineering, or a similar technical customer-facing function.
• 2+ years of people management or technical team leadership experience.
• Experience delivering technical customer projects involving software implementation, integrations, data migration, configuration, APIs, or enterprise systems.
• Strong project management instincts: scope control, timelines, risk management, stakeholder alignment, and crisp communication.
• Ability to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers, engineers, sales teams, and executives.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup with evolving process and ambiguous ownership boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading Forward Deployed Engineers, Solutions Architects, Implementation Engineers, or Professional Services Engineers.
• Experience with municipal utilities, infrastructure, public sector customers, GIS, CMMS, asset management systems, or inspection workflows.
• Familiarity with Cityworks, Cartegraph / OpenGov, Lucity, VUEWorks, ArcGIS, WinCan, ITpipes, or similar operational platforms.
• Experience building delivery playbooks, services catalogs, estimation models, or implementation methodologies from scratch.
• Technical fluency with APIs, databases, ETL workflows, SFTP and file exchange, data validation, and integration architecture.
• Experience partnering with Product and Engineering to productize repeatable services work.

Working Style & Collaboration

Key cross-functional partners: Customer Success and Technical Account Management on handoffs and adoption; Sales and Solutions Engineering on scoping, feasibility, and commitments made during the deal; Product and Engineering on escalations and on turning recurring services work into product; Finance and RevOps on billability and intake discipline.

How the role operates day-to-day: Runs the ProServe standup and owns prioritization and capacity calls across a live portfolio of customer projects. Spends meaningful time in customer conversations, particularly on at-risk or technically complex deployments. Expected to push back on commitments the team cannot deliver and to be the person who decides what gets declined, phased, or handed to Product.

Attributes that will make you successful:

• Customer-oriented: You care deeply about whether customers achieve practical, durable outcomes.
• Operationally rigorous: You create clarity and make work trackable without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Technically credible: You can understand complex implementation and integration problems well enough to guide the team and challenge assumptions.
• A strong people leader: You coach with empathy, set high standards, and help team members grow.
• Pragmatic: You know when to build a scalable process and when to solve the immediate customer problem.
• Cross-functional: You can align Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, and Services around shared priorities.
• Systems-minded: You look for patterns and build repeatable mechanisms rather than treating every project as a one-off.