Engagement Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About this role

Why SailPoint? Love what you do. And love where you do it. Smart people, fun culture, innovative work, beautiful offices — oh, and everyone’s really nice. That’s what people say about SailPoint. We’re known as the company where everyone wants to work, and we have the awards to prove it. If you’re passionate about outsmarting cybercriminals and working at a company where you can truly have an impact, and we want you to join our team.    SailPoint empowers the largest, most complex organizations by putting identity at the Center of Security and IT.  Our 2,000+ customers include global financial institutions, government entities, and pharmaceutical organizations and more.   Who You Are: You are a self-directed, highly motivated, and experienced professional that thrives while overseeing multiple projects and prospective client opportunities. It is easy for you to build and maintain professional working relationships, and you are comfortable interacting with people at all levels within an organization. You possess strong leadership, communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills and can balance both team and individual workloads. You are an exceptional multitasker, with the ability to meet and manage moving deadlines, gauge risks, and creatively resolve unexpected issues that arise. By leveraging your experience, you can identify.   Role Summary: Operating at the intersection of Solution Engineering, Professional Services and Product Management, the Forward Deployed Engineering team (FDEs) leverages state-of-the-art AI tooling alongside deep implementation expertise and industry knowledge to build foundational solutions, solve complex problems, accelerate our customers' time-to-value and decrease the cost of traditional services. 

The Engagement Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, operates as the programmatic backbone for global modernization and Forward Deployed Engineering initiatives. While acting as an Engagement Manager on key accounts, this role heavily functions as a Program Manager—tasked with designing, standardizing, and maintaining and executing the operational frameworks that allow the team to scale. Reporting to the Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will build robust procedures that bridge pre-sales scoping and post-sales delivery, ensuring consistency, governance, and velocity across all global engagements.     Responsibilities: Process Engineering & Programmatic Governance • Design, implement, and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the end-to-end modernization deal lifecycle. • Establish programmatic governance over scoping frameworks, ensuring consistency, quality control, and continuous improvement across all global regions. • Identify operational bottlenecks within the Forward Deployed Engineering team and develop scalable, repeatable processes to resolve them.

Deal Scoping & Pre-Sales Operations • Oversee and execute global Level of Effort (LOE) estimations, utilizing standardized frameworks to ensure rapid turnaround times and maintain deal velocity. • Manage and continuously optimize the global scoping calculator, acting as the owner of the tool's underlying logic and programmatic updates. • Act as a tactical resource and process guide on customer-facing sales calls, seamlessly navigating stakeholders through the modernization pathway. • Provide feedback based on experience in pre-sales activities to larger FDE team.

Cross-Functional Alignment & SOW Handoffs • Build and govern the pre-to-post-sales handoff process between the Forward Deployed Engineering team, SailPoint Professional Services (PS), and Partners. • Standardize how scoping requirements are translated into clear deployment guidelines, technical specifications, and Statements of Work (SOWs) inputs to eliminate ambiguity. • Serve as the central program liaison for PS and Partners, ensuring adherence to established engagement procedures on active modernization projects.

Enablement Program Management • Architect and manage a formalized enablement program to drive a regular cadence of knowledge transfer and best-practice sharing for the global Partners, PS and Sales teams. • Develop repeatable educational playbooks to scale awareness for legacy modernization prospects and net-new Forward Deployed Engineering opportunities.

  Required Skills & Experience: • Experience: 5+ years of experience in program management, process engineering, technical pre-sales, or engagement management within the enterprise software space. • Process Design: Strong proven track record of creating, documenting, and enforcing standard operating procedures (SOPs) and operational frameworks from scratch. • Scoping & Frameworks: Experience developing programmatic tools, Level of Effort (LOE) calculators, and standardizing Statement of Work (SOW) generation. • Project & Program Management: Exceptional organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple concurrent deal cycles while simultaneously building long-term operational infrastructure. • Technical Aptitude: Ability to quickly learn software solutions, deployment methodologies, and modernization concepts to effectively build processes around them (IAM experience is a plus, but deep architectural knowledge is not required). • Communication: Exceptional ability to drive cross-functional alignment, manage change, and clearly communicate process updates to technical and business stakeholders.

    Success Milestones: What to Expect at 1, 3, and 6 Months 1 Month In: Onboarding, Training, and Discovery • Complete internal corporate onboarding and integrate with the Forward Deployed Engineering team. • Complete Product Training: Successfully finish the Identity Security Leader and the Identity Security Administrator (Identity Security Cloud) training paths via SailPoint Identity University, establishing a strong baseline knowledge of Identity Security principles and core platform functionality. • Shadow the Director on active deal scoping, sale

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