General Manager Forward Deployed Engineering

Location: Hyderabad, India

Work Model: Fully Onsite 5 Days/Week

Employment Type: Full time

Experience: 12+ years

Reports To: 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 810 Forward Deployed Engineers and will have end-to-end responsibility for P&L;, 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.

Key Responsibilities: Business and P&L; Ownership

- Own the FDE business units 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 810 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.

Candidate Profile
- 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.Role & responsibilities

Preferred candidate profile

📌 General Manager (Hyderabad)
🏢 Zion Cloud Solutions
📍 Hyderabad