Forward Deployed Engineer - Lead

We Are: Accenture is a global professional services company that helps the world’s leading organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth, and enhance services — creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with 750,000+ people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. Our Reinvention AI (RIAI) practice sits at the leading edge of enterprise agentic AI. We help organizations move from natural language business conversations to structured, AI-orchestrated execution plans — deploying multi-agent systems, durable workflow orchestration, and enterprise-grade governance on AWS. The Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) team is the specialist group that brings RIAI to life in enterprise client environments, from infrastructure provisioning through production handover. We are growing our North America FDE team and are looking for a senior delivery and technology leader to drive this next phase. You Are: A seasoned technology delivery leader who thrives at the intersection of enterprise platform deployment, program governance, and client engagement. You bring deep experience managing complex, multi-workstream technology implementations in cloud and client-hosted environments — and you are energized by the challenge of building scalable delivery practices in fast-moving, ambiguous contexts. You are as comfortable presenting delivery health to a client CIO as you are in a detailed infrastructure architecture discussion with an engineering team. You take ownership naturally, communicate proactively, and build the kind of trust with clients and internal stakeholders that keeps complex programs on track. You think like a product team — building assets and practices that compound in value over time — and you care deeply about making every deployment better than the last. The Work: As Associate Director, Forward Deployment Engineering — North America, you will be the delivery and program management backbone of the NA FDE team, owning governance, planning, and operational rigor across all active RIAI client deployments. Key responsibilities include: Lead end-to-end delivery governance across active Reinvention AI client deployments in North America — from mobilization and environment setup through integration validation and operational handover Build and maintain integrated delivery plans, milestone tracking frameworks, dependency maps, and risk registers for each client engagement Establish and own operating rhythms — standups, deployment reviews, executive status reporting, escalation protocols — across the FDE team and with client counterparts Lead pre-engagement discovery with client IT, infrastructure, and architecture teams; own the client readiness assessment process covering AWS accounts, VPC and networking, identity and SSO, DNS, model access, and security posture Drive creation and continuous improvement of deployment runbooks, operational playbooks, and reusable delivery artifacts — capturing lessons learned from every engagement and feeding them back into the team’s approach Identify manual steps and gaps across the deployment sequence; partner with Platform Engineering to drive automation and standardization Produce and deliver executive delivery health reports for Accenture and client leadership; facilitate high-stakes sessions including risk escalations, go/no-go decisions, and operational handover discussions Lead, coach, and mentor program managers and senior engineers on the FDE team; coordinate resource planning and capacity across concurrent client engagements Serve as the NA FDE team’s primary escalation point for delivery risk, stakeholder alignment, and execution blockers requiring senior leadership engagement Travel may be required for this role. The