Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Forward Deployed Engineering Manager role sits at a common inflection point in SaaS: an established enterprise platform with broad adoption, now incubating a new AI agent capability inside a dedicated labs-style group. The remit spans deploying agentic workflows into real customer environments while feeding learnings back into the core product, which is increasingly how AI features become durable SaaS primitives rather than one-off demos.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is the combination of customer proximity and product influence. Forward-deployed work builds judgment on what can be standardized, what must remain configurable, and how to translate messy business goals into repeatable platform capabilities. The role also offers practical exposure to operating LLM-powered systems in production, including iteration loops driven by usage data and stakeholder outcomes, which is becoming a foundational skill set across modern SaaS teams.
This is best suited to an engineering leader who enjoys context switching between delivery, technical direction, and executive-level customer conversations. It will appeal to someone who prefers ambiguous problem spaces, is comfortable being accountable for shipped outcomes, and wants to lead a small pod while staying meaningfully hands-on.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
The Role
We have thousands of enterprise users, proven product-market fit across digital shelf analytics, retail media, and sales operations, and the Fortune 100 running on our platform. That part works. Now we are building something new: autonomous AI agents that are already in customer hands and scaling fast. This is a 0-to-1 build inside a company that has the distribution, the data, and the customers to make it real.
The AI Labs team operates as a startup within the company. It needs its own engineering leader. Someone who can recruit a world-class team in Mountain View, set the technical direction for agentic AI in commerce, and ship at a pace that matches the opportunity. We have engineering teams across the US, India, Canada, and the UK. Mountain View is the center of gravity for AI leadership.
This role reports directly to the Founders. We ship with Claude, GPT-4, and open-source models in production. Our engineers already write the majority of code with AI. Some things are great. Some things need to be rebuilt. The next leader will know the difference.
This is an onsite role with expectations that you are working from the office Monday-Friday
What You Will Do
Deploy AI Solutions with Customers
- Work directly with enterprise customers to implement AI agents and workflows across content, media, and sales use cases
- Customize and adapt CommerceIQ’s platform to fit real-world customer environments
- Drive rapid iteration cycles based on customer feedback and usage
Bridge Customer Needs with Product & Engineering
- Translate ambiguous business problems into technical solutions and product requirements
- Provide structured feedback to product and engineering teams to improve core platform capabilities
- Identify patterns across customers and help shape repeatable product features vs one-off solutions
Lead a High-Impact Engineering Pod
- Manage a small team of engineers focused on customer deployments and solutioning
- Ensure high quality of delivery while maintaining speed and adaptability
- Balance hands-on technical software development with ai tools like claude, cursor (~40%) with leadership and stakeholder management
Drive Business Impact
- Understand customer KPIs and ensure deployed solutions drive measurable outcomes
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to customer stakeholders
- Partner with GTM and Customer Success teams to expand and deepen customer value
- Close pilots
Shape the Future of AI at CommerceIQ
- Bring frontline insights into how AI is used in production
- Influence how CommerceIQ evolves from SaaS to AI-native workflows and agents
- Help define best practices for deploying AI systems at enterprise scale
What We Look For
This is not a caretaker role. We need a builder. Here is what matters:
Builder with Customer Instinct.
- Experience working in customer-facing engineering, solutions engineering, or consulting roles
- Background in technology consulting, business consulting, or forward deployed engineering
- Ability to operate in ambiguous environments and solve real business problems
AI Product Exposure.
- LLM-powered features
- AI copilots / assistants
- Workflow automation
- Understanding of how AI systems behave in real-world production environments
Product & Business Thinking.
- Ability to connect technical solutions to business outcomes
- Strong intuition for what should be productized vs customized
- Experience collaborating closely with product teams
- Business Consulting exp is a must have
Leadership & Execution.
- Experience managing engineers or leading small teams
- Ability to drive high-velocity execution in dynamic environments
- Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders
Why This Role is Unique
- You are closest to the customer problem - not building in isolation
- You influence both product direction and customer success
- You operate at the intersection of: Engineering, AI, and Business outcomes
Compensation and Benefits
Base: $160,000 - $210,000
Equity: Significant pre-IPO stock options. This is a leadership seat and the equity reflects that. We are at a stage where senior hires still get meaningful ownership.
Benefits: Full medical, dental, vision. 401(k). Unlimited PTO.
Location: Mountain View, CA. Onsite. 15 minutes from Stanford campus.
Why join now:
- The window is now. The company has product-market fit, revenue, and customers. The AI Labs team is being built right now. In 12 months this team will be set. The founding members will define the culture, the architecture, and the trajectory. This is that moment.
- Real AI, not AI theater. Most companies are bolting AI onto legacy products and calling it innovation. We are rebuilding the entire platform around autonomous agents. Our agents are already in production, already in customer workflows, already making decisions. If you want to lead a team doing real AI, this is it.
- Fortune 100 scale. Your decisions will directly affect how 2,200+ brands run their ecommerce. The Fortune 100 uses our platform to manage billions of dollars in commerce. This is not a sandbox.
Equity upside. Pre-IPO. $200M+ raised from tier-one investors. The economics of joining at this stage, in this role, are compelling.
Check out our LinkedIn page to learn more about what it’s like to work at CommerceIQ!
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other category prohibited by applicable law.
