Sr Forward Deployed Engineer

About Zuora

At Zuora, we help businesses grow smarter and adapt faster. Our platform powers modern business models — from subscriptions and usage-based pricing to AI-driven and outcome-based offerings — helping companies launch new products, automate complex billing, and unlock predictable, recurring revenue.

We’ve led the Subscription Economy for more than a decade. Now we’re evolving again by building the definitive platform for quote to cash and helping companies monetize their products and services with an adaptable, AI-ready foundation.

 

The Opportunity

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is Zuora's newest technical go-to-market motion, pairing a Forward Deployed Product Manager (internally, an Echo) with one or two Forward Deployed Engineers inside fixed-time customer engagements. This is a full-time role: you'll run a portfolio of engagements deployed in weeks to months, building the playbook as you go. Our focus: building the future of agentic quote-to-cash, which means helping enterprises monetize AI-native and usage-based products, and taking Zuora's new AI agents into their first customer deployments.

The job is to own the customer problem end to end and build the answer with the customer: turn a messy field signal into a working prototype, a clear specification and measurable success criteria, take the engagement from idea to production in weeks, not quarters, and leave behind a documented, reusable asset with a commercial next step. You'll work closely with Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales, Services and Support to keep every engagement tied to a real customer outcome.

What you'll do & achieve

Discover and design

• Run technical discovery with the customer's engineering, product and finance leaders. Map quote-to-cash workflows, exceptions, handoffs and control points, and define the prototype that proves the ideal end-state integration and the success criteria it must meet.
• Identify and prioritize agent use cases by value, data readiness and risk. Recommend what to automate, what to assist and what to leave to people.
• Be the customer's primary day-to-day contact, and decide what is in and out of scope.

Specification & signoff

• Draft the specification with your Forward Deployed Engineer: customer need, gap, build and maintainer of record, plus the agent spec (success metrics, acceptance criteria, level of autonomy, escalation paths and approval rules for any action in a system of record). Drive it through customer sponsor, FDE leadership and Product & Engineering signoff. No unsigned builds.
• Build golden datasets and eval plans with customer experts, and review results with your engineer at every gate.
• Design human-in-the-loop controls with the customer's Controllers and Internal Audit, including approvals, segregation of duties and audit evidence.

Co-build with the customer

• Embed with the customer's engineering, product and finance teams and build alongside them and your Forward Deployed Engineer. You own the outcome, not a status report.
• Ship to a fixed clock. Scope to what the customer's team can run after we leave, not the wishlist.
• Start only with a named customer sponsor and a real resourcing commitment. The customer, not FDE, is usually the long pole on speed.
• Build first: prototype agents, workflows and pricing models yourself with AI tools, and prove the idea on the customer's real data before engineering commits.
• Pull in whatever the outcome needs: Zuora engineers, product, Services, partners, the customer's own people, or agents. Point them at the work; a great engagement puts far more hands on the problem than the pod alone.
• Drive adoption through rollout, and report business impact (hours saved, errors reduced, faster close, cash collected) in terms an executive acts on.

Deploy agents and AI monetization

• Lead first customer deployments of Zuora's new AI agents, from deal desk and quoting to billing and revenue, and identify the use cases and customer segments they open up.
• Lead AI-monetization engagements: model usage, credit and hybrid pricing with the customer, and define how metering, entitlements, billing and revenue recognition fit together.

Reuse & readout

• Own the engagement Brief (our standard exit write-up of what was built, what broke, what's reusable and where it should live next) and the reuse case. Present at the monthly readout and quarterly portfolio review, and turn repeatable patterns into playbooks, product requirements and filed product gaps.

Commercial partnership

• Dual-thread with the account team: the AE owns commercials, you own the technical buyer. Every engagement names its commercial next step before kickoff.

Enablement

• Mentor new teammates as the team grows, and act as the motion's evangelist across the field.

What we look for

• Builder. Show us what you've built: a product, workflow, agent or tool you shipped that real people use. Walk us through the decisions, the trade-offs and what broke.
• Founder mentality: you act like an owner of the business, not the ticket. You weigh cost, speed and customer impact, make the call, and fix what's broken even when it isn't yours.
• Ownership: you want the ball when the stakes are highest, own the outcome rather than the activity, and see it through.
• Polite persistence: you get to yes without burning bridges. When a customer sponsor, partner or internal team stalls, you chase down the decision, the data or the person the engagement needs, and keep the relationship intact.
• Curiosity: you dig until you understand how the customer's business actually runs, from their pricing and systems to how finance closes the books.
• Doer by default: you'd rather build a working version than write a deck about it.
• Force multiplier: you've delivered outcomes by pulling in people and agents beyond your own team.
• AI-first: you prototype with AI before you ask engineering for anything. You've built a working agent, workflow or prompt-driven tool yourself and can walk us through it, including where it failed and how you caught it.
• 5+ years as a customer-facing product manager, CSE, solutions or implementation lead, or software engineer, owning complex enterprise engagements.
• Strong grounding in Zuora's products or comparable billing, CPQ and quote-to-cash platforms. Subscription billing and usage-based monetization depth is ideal.
• Working knowledge of the quote-to-cash process, including CPQ and deal desk, and of how customers combine billing with third-party metering and entitlement tools.
• Hands-on experience shaping LLM or agent solutions: writing and testing prompts, defining evals, and judging outputs against risk tolerance. You do not need to be an ML engineer.
• Can extract the essential requirements from a rambling workshop and turn it into a crisp, decision-ready spec an engineer can build against right away.
• Comfort with data (SQL, mapping, reconciliation) and with API and integration concepts.
• Customers trust you in the room: strong presence with both technical and executive stakeholders.
• Comfortable co-defining a role that changes under you.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with SOX or IT general controls experience, or a CPA or accounting background.
• Founder or early-team experience, ideally in AI monetization, agentic product development and deployment, or