Forward Deployed Engineering Manager specialized in Defense Projects
At Globant, we are working to make the world a better place, one step at a time. We enhance business development and enterprise solutions to prepare them for a digital future. With a diverse and talented team present in more than 30 countries, we are strategic partners to leading global companies in their business process transformation.
We are seeking an Engineering Manager (Forward Deployed Engineering Manager) with specialized experience in defense projects and mission-critical technology solutions. The ideal candidate shares our passion for innovation, technical excellence, and customer-focused delivery.
This role is responsible for leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams embedded with strategic customers, particularly within the defense sector. The successful candidate will drive the delivery of secure, reliable, and scalable technical solutions while providing strong technical guidance, ensuring engineering quality, and supporting the growth and development of engineers.
Candidates should bring a strong combination of engineering leadership, hands-on technical expertise, customer engagement, and proven experience delivering technology solutions for defense organizations or defense-related projects.
The Role
The Forward Deployed Engineering Manager (FDE Manager) leads and scales a team of high-performing engineers embedded directly with strategic customers, including those operating in the defense sector.
In this role, you are accountable for three key areas: the technical quality of the solutions your team builds, the success of your customer engagements, and the career growth of your engineers.
You operate at the intersection of people leadership, technical strategy, customer excellence, and secure technology delivery. You must understand the technical substance of your deployments well enough to review architecture and unblock your team, while ensuring your engineers focus on high-level technical challenges rather than routine project operations.
You will also ensure that solutions developed for defense-related engagements align with applicable security requirements, operational standards, and compliance obligations.
What You'll Do
1. Lead Delivery & Customer Success
Own the Outcomes: Drive technical delivery across one or more concurrent enterprise customer engagements, ensuring production systems meet customer expectations, operational standards, and applicable security requirements.
Strategic Partnering: Represent the engineering team to customer leadership and internal Go-To-Market (GTM) stakeholders, building trusted relationships with defense-sector customers and other strategic accounts.
Scope & Unblock: Translate ambiguous enterprise and defense-sector requirements into clear technical plans. Anticipate delivery risks, resolve escalations, and protect your team's bandwidth.
Mission-Critical Delivery: Oversee the delivery of reliable, secure, and scalable solutions designed to support demanding operational environments and mission-critical use cases.
2. People Leadership & Team Building
Hire & Scale: Attract, interview, and onboard top-tier engineering talent capable of thriving in high-intensity, customer-facing environments, including complex defense-related engagements.
Coach & Develop: Mentor engineers, drive performance management, set clear goals, and build career development plans across the FDE track.
Resource Management: Match engineers to projects based on their skills, career goals, and project requirements, balancing team utilization with employee wellbeing.
Build High-Performing Teams: Establish a culture of technical excellence, accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
3. Technical Craft, Architecture & Security
Player-Coach: Provide technical oversight for customer programs. Review architectural decisions, data pipelines, and code to ensure alignment with engineering best practices.
Secure Architecture: Guide the design and implementation of secure cloud environments, access controls, network isolation, encryption, and other relevant security controls for defense-related solutions.
Raise the Bar: Define and enforce engineering quality standards. Ensure appropriate CI/CD practices, evaluation frameworks, testing, and production-readiness criteria are met.
AI/ML & Advanced Solutions: Provide technical guidance on AI/ML deployments, data engineering, and agentic AI applications where relevant to customer requirements.
Product Feedback Loop: Synthesize learnings, reusable patterns, and tooling from customer engagements and feed them back to the core Product and Engineering teams to improve the foundational platform.
What You Bring
Experience: 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or a related technical field, including at least 3+ years of direct engineering management experience.
Defense Industry Experience: Proven experience delivering or leading technology projects for defense organizations, defense contractors, or defense technology companies. Familiarity with the operational, security, and compliance requirements of defense-related environments is strongly preferred.
Technical Depth: Strong background in systems architecture, data pipelines, AI/ML deployments, or cloud infrastructure. Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Java, or Go.
Customer-Facing Experience: Proven experience managing engineering teams in customer-embedded, consulting-oriented, or forward-deployed environments, ideally supporting complex defense-sector engagements.
Security & Compliance Awareness: Experience designing or overseeing secure, reliable systems that meet stringent security and compliance requirements. Familiarity with Zero Trust, IAM, encryption, and secure cloud architecture is an advantage.
Communication: Exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes for non-technical executive stakeholders while retaining the credibility to discuss architecture with senior engineers.
Agility: A track record of thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous, and rapidly scaling startup or enterprise environments.
Bonus Points
Prior experience deploying AI/ML models or Agentic AI applications in enterprise production environments, particularly for defense or mission-critical use cases.
Deep familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure, including AWS, GCP, or Azure, and enterprise data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, or Palantir Foundry.
Experience with secure, isolated, or regulated cloud environments and defense-related cybersecurity standards.
Experience building AI-powered decision-support systems, operational dashboards, or mission-critical data platforms.
Relevant security certifications or experience working within regulated defense environments, where applicable to the engagement.
Location: Dubai, UAE
Create with us digital products that people love. We will bring businesses and consumers together through AI technology and creativity, driving digital transformation to impact the world positively.
We may use AI and machine learning technologies in our recruitment process. Compensation is determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and location. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a comprehensive benefits package. Learn more about our commitment to diversity and inclusion and Globant’s Benefits.