Senior Director- Forward Deployment Engineering

About Yellow.ai

Yellow.ai is a global leader in enterprise-grade conversational AI, enabling businesses to deliver intelligent, automated customer experiences at scale across voice, chat, and digital channels. Our platform serves 1,000+ enterprises across 60+ countries spanning BFSI, retail, healthcare, and telecom sectors.

Role Summary

As a leader of Field Deployment Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for the end-to-end technical deployment lifecycle of Yellow.ai's conversational AI platform across enterprise customers globally. This leader will own pre-sales solutioning, customer onboarding, platform integration, and post-go-live stability — ensuring world-class deployment outcomes that drive adoption, retention, and expansion.

This role requires a rare blend of deep technical depth, executive stakeholder management, and the ability to build and scale high-performing global FDE teams in a fast-paced, hyper-growth environment.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Leadership & Vision

• Define and own the FDE function's multi-year roadmap, operating model, and team structure.
• Partner with Sales, Product, and Customer Success leadership to align deployment strategy with revenue and retention goals.
• Represent FDE at the C-suite and Board level, providing visibility into deployment health, risk, and capacity planning.
• Drive a culture of technical excellence, customer obsession, and continuous improvement within the FDE org.

2. Enterprise Deployment Execution

• Own accountability for all enterprise deployment milestones — from kickoff and solution design through go-live and stabilisation.
• Establish and enforce deployment playbooks, architecture standards, and quality benchmarks across the FDE team.
• Resolve escalations from enterprise accounts with a hands-on approach where required.
• Lead solution architecture reviews for complex, multi-channel, multi-region deployments.

3. Pre-Sales & Solutioning

• Partner closely with Sales and Pre-Sales to design winning technical proposals, PoC strategies, and deployment timelines for new logo acquisition.
• Build FDE's role in RFP/RFI responses, shaping differentiating technical narratives around deployment speed, integration capability, and platform scalability.
• Own relationships with technical decision-makers (CTOs, CDOs, CIOs) at key prospect and customer organizations.

4. Team Building & Talent Development

• Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of FDEs, Deployment Managers, and Solution Architects across geographies.
• Implement coaching, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing programs that elevate team capability and reduce time-to-productivity for new hires.

5. Process Excellence & Tooling

• Drive continuous improvement of deployment methodologies — reducing average time-to-go-live and deployment-related churn.
• Build and maintain a library of reusable deployment accelerators: connectors, integration templates, bot frameworks, and runbooks.
• Establish robust KPI frameworks (CSAT, TTV, deployment cycle time, escalation rate) and create executive-level reporting cadences.

6. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as the primary technical voice of the customer to the Product team — channeling field insights into the product roadmap.
• Collaborate with Support, CS, and Engineering to create seamless handoff protocols post-deployment.
• Work with Legal and Finance on deployment SLAs, professional services scoping, and SOW governance.

Experience

• 8+ years of experience in software deployment, professional services, or solutions engineering — with 3+ years in a senior leadership role.
• Proven track record of leading FDE, PS, or SE teams of 50+ people across multiple geographies.
• Hands-on experience deploying enterprise SaaS platforms — ideally in AI/ML, conversational AI, CX, or CRM domains.
• Demonstrated success managing complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deployments in industries such as BFSI, telecom, or retail.
• Experience working with customers in MEA, SEA, or US markets is a strong advantage.

Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of API integrations (REST, SOAP, webhooks), cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), and enterprise middleware.
• Familiarity with CRM/ITSM platforms (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk) and telephony ecosystems (Genesys, Avaya, Cisco).
• Ability to engage confidently in architecture discussions with customer engineering teams on topics such as data security, SSO, load balancing, and HA configurations.
• Exposure to NLP/AI platforms and conversational design principles is a strong plus.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Executive presence — comfortable presenting to C-suite and Board-level stakeholders.
• Strong commercial acumen: ability to quantify deployment value, negotiate SOWs, and manage P&L for professional services engagements.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in English; additional language proficiency (Arabic, Bahasa, French) is an advantage.
• Data-driven decision-making with a bias for action; comfortable operating in ambiguity.