General Manager - Forward Deployed Engineering

: Position : General Manager - 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 8 - 10 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. 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 8 - 10 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.