Level

Cursor

Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - India

AI in this role

Lead a team of forward-deployed engineers to embed with enterprise customers and build production-grade AI coding workflows using Cursor.

sales-engineeringtechnical-leadershipenterprise-salesclient-management

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.

About the role

We're building a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close the gap between the value our enterprise customers expect from Cursor and the value they're actually getting. FDEs don't advise, they embed directly with customer engineering teams, build production-grade Cursor workflows, and transfer the habits and culture that compound long after the engagement ends. The measure of success is what's different at day 30, not what got shipped.

We're looking for a Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering to lead and help scale this team. You'll manage a growing team of FDEs working across our most strategic enterprise accounts, own what makes a world-class FDE engagement, and stay close enough to the work to escalate, coach, and course-correct in real time. You will serve as the primary point of contact for customers, owning both project delivery and the day-to-day relationship, while also identifying and scoping new opportunities. You'll also build our partner FDE track — training and enabling GSI and consulting partners who extend this motion at scale.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines deep technical credibility, strong people management, and the judgment to keep engagements scoped tight, delivered fast, and worth repeating. This role will be based in all 3 cities: Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi.

What you’ll do

  • Sell

    • Own the full arc from technical discovery to executive close — partnering with Sales and Account teams to qualify opportunities, leading architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints, and scoping engagements with enough precision to de-risk delivery before a line of code is written

    • Build and present proposals that translate ambiguous customer problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROI

    • Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it

    • Drive deal strategy on strategic accounts; your technical credibility is a direct lever on close rates for six- and seven-figure engagements

    Deliver

    • Serve as executive technical sponsor on your region's highest-priority engagements and manage stakeholder relationships from IC engineers to C-suite

    • Ensure delivery quality across your team's projects: appropriate scoping, milestone tracking, technical standards, and clean handoffs to customer engineering teamsTranslate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions

    • Identify and escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions

    • Manage active engagements: escalate on complex builds, coach FDEs on scoping and delivery decisions, and step in directly on accounts where the stakes are highest

    • Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time

    Manage People

    • Lead, develop, and scale a team of 6–8 Forward Deployed Engineers working strategic FDE projects

    • Hire top-tier FDE talent; set clear expectations, technical performance standards, and career growth paths for a team where "excellent" means actually shipping in production

    • Coach FDEs through the hardest problems in the field — scoping under deal pressure, building alongside senior technical stakeholders, and knowing when to protect scope vs. when to flex

    • Build and scale the partner FDE track — train, enable, and hold the quality bar for GSI and consulting partners who carry the FDE motion forward at volume

You may be a fit if

  • You have 8+ years of experience leading technical teams that build and ship in production — Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or a similar function where writing and reviewing code is part of the job

  • You have experience with software development and coding in Python, Javascript/Typescript

  • You’ve built and owned AI-native workflows in production, not just prototypes, and have debugged real-world model failures

  • You can diagnose a complex enterprise engineering environment quickly, identify the highest-leverage intervention, and scope a meaningful engagement

  • You've built and scaled IC-level technical teams and know what excellence looks like in the field: sharp scoping, clean delivery, and knowledge that stays at the customer long after the engagement closes

How we rate this

Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - India at Cursor rates 70 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Sales EngineeringTechnical LeadershipEnterprise SalesClient Management

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where sales engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where enterprise sales was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where client management was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Sales Engineering, Technical Leadership, Enterprise Sales, and Client Management. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project — this role expects it to be a running habit.

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