Forward-Deployed Engineer

ABOUT VERCEL: Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company. We free people and agents to ship what’s next. For more than a decade, Vercel has shaped how the web is built. As the team behind Next.js, v0, and AI SDK, we create products that help builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience. Now, software is entering a new era, and the next generation of products will not just be used by people. They will be built, extended, and operated by agents. We are building the platform for that future, trusted by companies like OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide. Whether you’re building our products, supporting our customers, growing our community, or shaping our story, you’ll help define what comes next. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for a Senior Technical Account Manager (TAM) to join our Forward Deployed Engineering organization within Professional Services. As a Senior TAM, you will be the named, persistent technical owner for a small portfolio of Vercel's largest enterprise customers, a peer to their VPs of Engineering and CTOs, and the single technical point of contact that orchestrates outcomes across Support, Engineering, Product, and Sales. On the accounts you cover, you take over the post-sales technical relationship that a Solutions Architect (SA) would otherwise own, freeing the SA to focus on pre-sales and on accounts outside your portfolio. This is a billable, customer-funded role. Customers purchase Senior TAM engagement as part of their Vercel relationship, and you will carry a portfolio of no more than eight concurrent accounts. You will not be on-call, you will not write production code, and you will not carry a sales quota. You will own the technical relationship, drive proactive risk identification and architectural guidance, and ensure every other Vercel engagement on your accounts (e.g. Platform Consumption, Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), Professional Services projects, audits, workshops) lands successfully and compounds in value over time. If our Professional Services team is structured around a simple frame - PS delivers outcomes, FDE delivers velocity, TAM delivers continuity - you are the continuity. You are the reason a customer’s third year on Vercel is more valuable to them than their first. You will report to the Head of Forward Deployed Engineering and will be located within the EMEA region. If you’re based within a pre-determined commuting distance of one of our offices (London, or Berlin), the role includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, even if the role is listed as remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team. WHAT YOU WILL DO * Own the post-sales technical relationship for a portfolio of up to three strategic enterprise accounts. You are the customer's named technical owner, the person their VP of Engineering calls when something matters. You take this accountability over from the Solutions Architect at deal close, through a formal handover, and you hold it for the life of the engagement. You co-own each account with the Account Executive, with clear domain boundaries: you own technical, they own commercial, and both of you have veto rights within your domain. You run a defined cadence with each account: weekly 30-minute check-ins, monthly business reviews, quarterly QBRs, and an annual roadmap workshop. This cadence is a floor, not a ceiling. * Lead post-incident pattern ownership and technical triage. You are not the 24/7 first call. Customer Support remains the front line, but when an incident escalates or a pattern emerges across multiple incidents, you take ownership. You drive the post-mortem, identify the architectural root cause, and own the remediation roadmap. You commit to responding within 4 business hours to any P1/P2 escalation routed to you, and you are the customer’s escalation path when standard Support channels need acceleration. * Drive proactive technical strategy, cost optimization, and architectural guidance. You spend the majority of your time on work the customer doesn't yet know they need: architectural reviews, technical risk mapping, cost and usage optimization, pre-launch readiness assessments, and translating Vercel's product evolution into specific opportunities for the customer's business. These are jobs Vercel does for many customers through the Solutions Architecture function. On your accounts, you do them deeper, more often, and with sustained context that a generalist SA can't match. The best TAMs save customers more than the cost of the engagement through this work alone. * Scope and orchestrate Vercel’s broader engagement on your accounts. When your customers need hands-on engineering work, you scope and hand off to a Forward Deployed Engineer. When they need a deep audit, you scope and hand off to Professional Services. You do not deliver these engagements yourself, you co-ordinate, track and capture the outcomes of these engagements, weaving them into the customer’s story. - your leverage is in ensuring they happen at the right time, with the right scope, and that the outcomes integrate back into the customer’s longer-term technical roadmap. Throwaway demos and illustrative proofs-of-concept are part of the job; code that ships to a customer’s production environment is not. * Operate as the customer's voice inside Vercel. You translate customer technical needs into signal for Product, Engineering, and Support, using the same Vercel-internal channels that Solutions Architects and Developer Success Engineers use today. You hold internal teams accountable to commitments you've made to your customers. In the early phase of the function, you will do this primarily through influence and relationships built up by the broader Forward Deployed Engineering org; over time, this will operate through defined cross-functional service-level agreements you help establish. * Carry primary accountability for renewal of the TAM engagement on each of your accounts. The Senior TAM SKU is renewed annually. Your customers’ decision to renew is the most honest measure of the value you’ve delivered. You will be measured against a 90%+ TAM SKU renewal rate, with supporting metrics including TAM-specific CSAT (target 4.5/5+), escalation responsiveness against the 4-hour SLA (target 95%+), and influence on Professional Services and FDE attach. ABOUT YOU * 5+ years in customer-facing technical roles at a platform, infrastructure, or developer tools company, including Technical Account Management, Solutions Architecture, Developer Success Engineering, Customer Support Engineering, Field Engineering, or hands-on technical consulting. You have personally owned customer relationships at the $1M+ ACV tier, including running QBRs, leading roadmap workshops, navigating procurement and legal, and surviving renewal cycles.  * Deep production experience with Next.js and the Vercel platform. You have architected, debugged, and optimized production systems built on Vercel - not as a casual user, but as someone a customer’s senior engineer would trust on a Sev-1 call. You can speak fluently about App Router internals, ISR and caching strategies, Fluid Compute, the AI SDK, and the cost-optimization patterns that distinguish a healthy Vercel deployment from a runaway one. This is non-negotiable for the role. * Demonstrated track record of getting things done across organizations without formal authority. You have specific examples of times you drove a complex technical outcome that required coordination across Engineering, Product, and Support orgs at a previous company. You are comfortable holding senior internal stakeholders accountable to commitments they have made to your customers, and you escalate quickly when blocked rather than letting issues drift. * Strong written communication, particularly for executive and incident contexts. You write clear incident summaries, executive readouts, and post-mortems. You can compress a complex technical situation into a one-page summary a CTO will read and act on. Most TAM candidates over-index on verbal communication; we particularly value written. * Comfortable as a peer to senior technical leadership. You can sit in a room with a Fortune 500 CTO, push back on a flawed technical decision with confidence and respect, and leave the room with the relationship strengthened. You are comfortable making the case for an unpopular recommendation when you believe it is right for the customer. * Willing to travel approximately 4-8 times per year to customer offices for QBRs, the annual roadmap workshop, and incident retrospectives. We align Senior TAMs to the time zone of the customer’s technical team, so most travel will be within your region. * Comfortable taking over a customer relationship from a colleague. A meaningful portion of your accounts will be transitioned to you from a Solutions Architect at deal close, through a structured handover. You can absorb context quickly, build trust with a customer who didn't choose you, and continue a relationship someone else started without making it feel like a step backward for the customer. BONUS IF YOU * Have prior experience as a Technical Account Manager at a hyperscaler, infrastructure platform, or developer-tools company (AWS, Cloudflare, MongoDB, Snowflake, Datadog, GitHub, etc.). * Have hands-on experience with AI agent development, particularly using the Vercel AI SDK, MCP servers, or similar frameworks. * Have led FinOps or cloud cost-optimization engagements at scale. * Have run an annual technical roadmap workshop or “Well-Architected Review”-style engagement with an enterprise customer. * Have experience transitioning from a delivery or support role into a customer-owning role, and can articulate what changed in how you operated. * Have direct experience as a Solutions Architect or Customer Success role at a developer platform or infrastructure company, particularly one with a similar split between pre-sales SA and post-sales technical ownership.