Manager, Forward Deployed Engineer

WHO WE ARE Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpYpWfEK5s. We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering on Notion’s Services team, you will lead a team responsible for the hands-on technical delivery of our most complex customer engagements. Your team will design, build, and deploy production-ready solutions that help enterprise customers integrate Notion as the operating layer for their business. You will combine people leadership, technical judgment, and customer-facing delivery. You will coach Forward Deployed Engineers through discovery, architecture, implementation, and launch while remaining close enough to the work to guide difficult technical decisions, unblock delivery, and build trust with senior customer stakeholders. The team’s work includes custom code, production-grade agents and AI workflows using MCP, Agent APIs, and Notion’s automation and execution infrastructure, as well as integrations, data pipelines, enterprise migrations, and complex challenges involving scale, permissions, and governance. You will help establish how Services delivers complex technical implementations across EMEA. This includes building a high-performing team, improving delivery standards and reusable technical assets, partnering with Sales, Product, CX, and Engineering, and turning lessons from customer deployments into product and platform improvements. WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE - Lead, coach, and develop a team of Forward Deployed Engineers delivering complex enterprise customer engagements across EMEA. - Create a high-performance team environment with clear expectations, strong technical standards, effective feedback, and meaningful career development. - Own the quality and outcomes of engagements from technical discovery and requirements gathering through solution design, implementation, launch, and handover. - Act as a trusted technical and delivery advisor to customer engineering, IT, security, and business leaders, helping them make informed architectural decisions and deepen their use of Notion. - Guide the design, build, and operation of custom agents, integrations, automations, and data pipelines that connect Notion with customers’ systems and workflows. - Oversee large-scale content and data migrations, including discovery, scoping, data modeling, transformation logic, validation, cutover, and post-migration optimization. - Review technical designs and implementation plans, identify delivery risks early, and step in directly when an engagement requires senior technical leadership. - Partner with Sales and Services leaders on qualification, feasibility, scoping, effort estimation, staffing, and delivery planning for strategic opportunities. - Balance customer priorities, team capacity, and technical complexity to make sound staffing and sequencing decisions. - Help define and scale the operating model for Forward Deployed Engineering, including hiring, onboarding, delivery methodologies, quality reviews, documentation, and engineering best practices. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING - 8+ years of experience in forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, professional services, customer engineering, software engineering, or a similar hands-on technical role. - 2+ years of experience managing, coaching, or leading engineers responsible for customer-facing technical delivery. - A strong track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing technical teams. - Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Java, JavaScript, Node.js, SQL, or Python, with the technical depth to review production-quality code and guide implementation decisions. - Hands-on experience with APIs, integrations, authentication, data transformation, and production systems. - Experience leading technical discovery, assessing feasibility, identifying risks, scoping work, estimating effort, and translating ambiguous requirements into executable plans. - Strong architectural judgment and debugging skills, with the ability to isolate root causes across code, APIs, permissions, integrations, data quality, automation logic, system limits, and customer-specific environments. - Demonstrated success managing multiple complex customer engagements while maintaining quality, team health, and clear stakeholder communication. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and business audiences from practitioners through executive stakeholders. - A customer- and outcomes-oriented approach, with sound judgment about when to standardize, when to customize, and how to manage tradeoffs. NICE TO HAVES - Experience building or scaling a Forward Deployed Engineering, professional services, or customer engineering function in a startup or high-growth environment. - Experience deploying AI agents in complex coding or business workflows. - Experience designing or implementing AI-powered workflows involving MCP, APIs, LLM applications, prompt engineering, retrieval or RAG systems, or workflow orchestration. - Experience with ETL or ELT workflows, schema mapping, validation scripts, and large-scale content or data migration tool