Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

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The Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (Lead FDE) is a senior, customer-facing leader who owns the outcome thread across complex and strategic customer engagements. Working directly with executive, business, and technical stakeholders, the Lead FDE turns ambiguous priorities into measurable outcomes, establishes the path from opportunity to production value, and ensures the right combination of Forward Deployed, product, engineering, transformation, and platform capabilities are brought together around the customer need.

NTT DATA provides a reasonable range of compensation for U.S.

-based positions. The starting pay range for this role will depend on the nature of the role offered and will either be [$155,700 - $259,500], or [$80-$100] if the role is hired as a temporary position. Actual compensation will depend on a number of factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, technical skills, and other qualifications.

This position may also be eligible for incentive compensation based on individual and/or company performance. If the position offered in temporary, the position will not be eligible for incentive compensation.

This position is eligible for company benefits that will depend on the nature of the role offered.

Company benefits may include

• medical, dental, and vision insurance
• flexible spending or health savings account
• life and AD&D insurance
• short and long term disability coverage
• paid time off
• employee assistance
• participation in a 401k program with company match
• additional voluntary or legally-required benefits.

• Partner with executive, business, and technical stakeholders to define strategic objectives, priority workflows, measurable outcomes, and the decisions required to achieve them.
• Lead complex discovery, assessment, and solution-shaping engagements, turning ambiguous customer priorities into a coherent portfolio of validated opportunities and delivery decisions.
• Establish and maintain the outcome framework across engagements, including business ownership, baselines, target measures, assumptions, dependencies, and evidence required for progression.
• Direct rapid prototyping, proof points, experiments, and demonstrations, ensuring technical effort is focused on the assumptions most critical to customer value, adoption, and feasibility.
• Provide senior technical and solution judgement across AI, data, integration, architecture, security, privacy, Responsible AI, operational readiness, infrastructure, cost, and scalability.
• Shape strategic opportunities into production-ready work, ensuring architecture direction, backlog, dependencies, acceptance criteria, estimates, governance, and mobilisation are sufficiently mature for scalable delivery.
• Build trusted relationships with executive, business, and technical stakeholders, acting as a senior advisor who can simplify complexity, challenge constructively, and guide material customer decisions.
• Orchestrate specialist Forward Deployed practitioners and teams across industry, transformation, AI Studio, product, AI Factory, architecture, engineering, delivery, and operations around a single customer outcome.
• Lead resolution of complex business, technical, operational, and organisational challenges using sound judgement, structured problem-solving, evidence, and appropriate escalation.
• Identify, qualify, and prioritise high-value opportunities by combining domain context, customer strategy, technology capability, feasibility, adoption requirements, and measurable business impact.
• Determine and recommend the most appropriate delivery route, including AI Studio, company products, AI Factory, transformation services, partner capabilities, reuse, further validation, or stop.
• Maintain executive-level outcome stewardship as work moves into delivery and operation, validating major decisions, changes in assumptions, adoption signals, realised value, and the need to optimise, scale, redirect, or stop.
• Provide engagement-level assurance for Forward Deployed work, reviewing quality, customer readiness, production shaping, reuse, and transition into scalable delivery models.
• Capture field intelligence, customer signals, product feedback, implementation learning, reusable patterns, and recurring constraints, and translate them into improvements to products, platforms, offers, standards, and delivery methods.
• Develop FDE capability through mentoring, coaching, peer review, Candidate residency, accreditation input,…