Director, Forward Deployed Engineering – Federal

C3 AI (NYSE: AI), is the Enterprise AI application software company. C3 AI delivers a family of fully integrated products including the C3 Agentic AI Platform, an end-to-end platform for developing, deploying, and operating enterprise AI applications, C3 AI applications, a portfolio of industry-specific SaaS enterprise AI applications that enable the digital transformation of organizations globally, and C3 Generative AI, a suite of domain-specific generative AI offerings for the enterprise. Learn more at: C3 AI

C3 AI's Forward Deployed Engineering organization sits inside some of the most mission-critical customers in the U.S. government, turning signed contracts into production AI systems that civilian agencies and Department of War (DoW) / DoD components run their mission on. As Director, you will own a portfolio of our most strategic federal accounts end to end, from signature through production and into expansion, and you will lead the team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and Forward Deployed Team Leads (FDTLs) who make that delivery happen.

You will be two things at once: the executive the customer, program office, and contracting stakeholders trust to tell them the truth about their program, and the leader your team trusts to give them clear direction, real support, and room to grow. You set the technical and commercial roadmap for each engagement in your portfolio, run the relationship at the program executive and agency leadership level, and build, staff, and develop the team executing against that roadmap, including the accreditation and security work required to get a system into production on federal networks.

This is a role for someone who has run high-stakes federal client relationships, whether in top-tier consulting, federal systems integration, or technical program leadership, and who is ready to build and lead a team rather than sit inside a single account. You will operate at the executive table with the customer and the program office, go deep enough technically and procedurally to catch a bad scope, a wrong estimate, or an accreditation risk before it becomes a delivery risk, and build a team capable of delivering, including into accredited and high-side environments, without you in the room.

U.S. Citizenship required. Active DoD security clearance (Secret or higher) preferred.

Responsibilities

Portfolio leadership and delivery

• Own delivery outcomes across a portfolio of federal accounts spanning civilian agency and DoW/DoD customers, from signed SOW through production go-live and into expansion, coordinating Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), Forward Deployed Team Leads (FDTLs), Presales, and customer stakeholders against a single delivery plan per engagement.
• Set engagement structure across your portfolio — scope, milestones, dependencies, and value hypotheses — and hold the line on scope discipline as mission priorities, budget cycles, and program office direction shift.
• Run executive briefings and steering committee updates across accounts, translating delivery status, technical trade-offs, and accreditation posture into language a program executive or agency sponsor acts on.
• Own escalation management across your portfolio; when an engagement or an authorization timeline is at risk, you are the first call and the person who drives it back to green.

People management and team leadership

• Manage a team of Forward Deployed resources across your portfolio, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development, accounting for the clearance levels and environment access each account requires.
• Allocate staffing across accounts based on account priority, risk, growth stage, and clearance or access requirements, and reallocate quickly when an engagement's needs change.
• Set the technical and delivery bar for your team, and coach FDTLs and FDEs on how to run their own accounts — including their own ATO / cATO processes — with the same rigor you apply to yours.
• Own headcount planning for your portfolio: build the case for new roles, identify underperformance early, and manage out where needed.
• Create a bench strong enough that losing any single cleared person does not put an account at risk.

Technical fluency and scoping

• Lead or oversee technical discovery across your portfolio, mapping customer and mission workflows, identifying data and integration constraints, and defining MVP scope for new use cases.
• Translate customer and agency objectives into sequenced technical roadmaps that FDEs and FDTLs execute against, including deployment paths across IL boundaries (IL2 through IL6) and into SIPR, JWICS, or other air-gapped environments where required.
• Hold architecture and accreditation conversations with customer engineering stakeholders, ISSMs, and Authorizing Officials (AOs) credibly enough to evaluate trade-offs and catch scope, feasibility, or authorization problems before they become delivery risk.
• Oversee ATO / cATO strategy across your portfolio: know where each account stands on SSPs, POA&Ms, and accreditation artifacts, and unblock the team when authorization work stalls.
• Get hands-on when it matters — pressure-test a data model, sketch an integration approach, or validate a data assumption yourself when it's faster than waiting on someone else.

Use case adoption and expansion

• Identify the highest-value mission use cases across your portfolio and build the business case for each, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and ROI measurement.
• Drive pilot-to-production conversion by removing organizational, technical, and accreditation blockers that stall adoption after a use case proves out technically.
• Build the program office and agency leadership relationships that surface the next use case before the customer asks for it, turning single-workflow engagements into multi-year account growth.
• Partner with Sales and Presales to shape expansion opportunities using direct field insight into contract vehicles, budget cycles, and where customer mission problems and appetite sit.

Playbooks and organizational contribution

• Codify what works across your portfolio into reusable patterns — scoping templates, value measurement frameworks, staffing models, accreditation playbooks, and stakeholder playbooks — that other Directors and FDTLs can use.
• Feed field signal back into Product and Solutions on where the platform and base applications fall short of what federal customers actually need.
• Set the standard for how technical delivery, business ownership, accreditation rigor, and people leadership fit together in practice across the federal FDE organization.

Qualifications

• S. Citizenship required. Active DoD security clearance (Secret or higher) strongly preferred; TS/SCI a plus, or willingness and eligibility to pursue one.
• Bachelor’s degree required, preferably in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical discipline; MBA from a top-tier program strongly preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in management consulting or FDE/delivery leadership, with meaningful time in enterprise software, professional services, or technical consulting serving federal customers; consulting leadership experience at the Associate Partner/Principal level (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or equivalent) is strongly preferred.
• Prior people management experience — hiring, developing, and performance-managing a team, not just leading a workstream.
• A track record owning complex, multi-workstream delivery for civilian agency and/or DoW/DoD clients across multiple simultaneous engagements, with direct accountability for outcomes, not just process.
• Working knowledge of federal program structures and the authorization landscape — PMOs, ATOs, AOs, ISSMs, RMF, FedRAMP, and common federal contract vehicles — gained through direct delivery into federal accounts.
• Direct experience with AI agent deployment, LLM-based systems, or enterprise AI platforms in production, with enough technical fluency to understand data architecture, integration patterns, and agentic system concepts well enough to scope work and evaluate trade-offs.
• Comfortable enough with code to read a pull request, leverage agentic tools to write code, or follow a technical design doc without translation.
• Executive presence: comfortable running program executive and agency leadership briefings, navigating federal and enterprise politics, and holding firm on scope and priorities under pressure from a sponsor.
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity, including managing a team through it.
• Demonstrated ability to build trust with both a customer's program and business stakeholders and their technical teams simultaneously, and to build that same trust with a team you manage.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior tech lead, program lead, or delivery leadership experience at a federal-focused software vendor or service software factory (Kessel Run, Kobayashi Maru, Platform One, Army Software Factory, or similar).
• Experience with accredited cloud environments such as AWS GovCloud / C2S or Azure Government / Government Secret, and familiarity with Advana or other CDAO-managed environments.
• Experience in a key mission or industry vertical: defense, intelligence, maritime, manufacturing, energy, or other federal mission areas.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed, embedded delivery model at another federal-focused software or AI platform vendor.
• Experience building or scaling a delivery function or team, not just operating within one.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future company sponsorship.

C3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan. 

Virginia Base Pay Range$180,000—$230,000 USD

C3 AI is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristics, including disabled and veteran status.