Senior Technical Program Manager - Forward Deployed Engineering

Senior Technical Program Manager - FDE, Core42, Abu Dhabi - UAE About Us Core42, a leader in AI-powered cloud and digital infrastructure, is driving transformative technology solutions globally.

Leveraging advanced resources and partnerships, Core42 empowers clients to harness sovereign AI infrastructure, especially in sectors with stringent regulatory needs.

With a mission to redefine digital transformation, we combine sovereign capabilities with scalable, high-performance compute infrastructure, positioning Core42 at the forefront of AI innovation in the Middle East and beyond.

The opportunity As Senior Technical Program Manager - Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), you will embed with strategic customers and lead the end-to-end journey from opportunity qualification and problem definition through co-engineering delivery, production adoption and measurable business outcomes.

You will operate at the intersection of customer strategy, product thinking, analytics and engineering, bringing structure to ambiguity without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

You will use design-thinking and business-analysis methods to uncover the real customer problem, map users and workflows, test assumptions, define success measures and translate qualified needs into clear scenarios, user stories, technical requirements and a sequenced delivery plan.

Working in a small multidisciplinary crew with Forward Deployed Engineers, software engineers, data scientists, designers, product managers, security specialists and customer domain experts, you will maintain alignment, decision velocity and outcome accountability across business and technical stakeholders.

This is an individual-contributor technical program leadership role. It is not the Forward Deployed Engineer profile and is not a people-management role.

The TPM qualifies the problem, shapes the program, aligns stakeholders and drives execution; the FDE owns hands-on solution architecture, coding, deployment and production engineering. Your key responsibilities:

• Customer discovery and qualification: Lead structured discovery with executives, domain experts, users, engineering, data, security and operations teams. Determine whether a problem is valuable, feasible, deployable and suitable for an FDE engagement before committing delivery capacity.

• Problem framing and design thinking: Use user research, stakeholder interviews, workflow observation, journey mapping, service blueprints, problem statements, ideation, prototyping and validation to distinguish root causes from requested features and define the right problem to solve.

• Business analysis and value definition: Analyze workflows, baseline performance, demand, constraints, risks and available data. Build a clear value hypothesis, expected business or operational impact, measurable success indicators and an evidence plan for validating outcomes.

• Requirements translation: Convert customer context into prioritized scenarios, personas, user journeys, user stories, acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, data and integration needs, security and sovereignty constraints, and decision-ready engineering briefs.

• Program shaping and roadmap: Define the engagement charter, MVP or first-production scope, delivery increments, milestones, dependencies, critical path, readiness gates, rollout approach and adoption plan. Protect speed by controlling scope and making trade-offs explicit.

• End-to-end execution: Own the program operating rhythm from discovery through prototype, production deployment, stabilization, adoption and closure. Maintain clear owners, decisions, risks, actions, dependencies and measurable outcomes across internal and customer teams.

• Technical fluency: Work credibly across AI, cloud, data, application and integration domains. Partner with engineers to test feasibility, understand architecture and model trade-offs, sequence technical work and challenge assumptions without replacing engineering ownership.

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