[Hiring] Customer Delivery Lead @Salt Ai

Role Description

As a Customer Delivery Lead, you own our most strategic enterprise deployments end to end — from initial scoping through production go-live and customer self-sufficiency. Reporting to the Chief Customer Officer, you'll work with leading pharma, biotech, investment banking, and energy enterprises deploying Salt into demanding SaaS, VPC, and on-prem environments.

This is a senior, judgment-heavy role. You define what we're building, negotiate what we're not, direct the Forward Deployed Engineers and Customer Solutions Engineers assigned to your accounts, and hold the line when a customer pushes to expand scope mid-engagement. You'll keep engagement detail current in our existing AI-first project management flow (Slack → Notion → Linear), where engineers groom their own tickets — so your time goes to scoping and direction, not ticket administration.

What You'll Be Doing

• Scope engagements down to one or two named workflows with fixed timelines, and drive customer stakeholders to converge on them quickly.
• Define the engagement exit before work begins: what customer self-sufficiency looks like, written down and agreed.
• Own SOW terms and the deal scope boundary — including the authority to decline out-of-scope asks from senior customer stakeholders.
• Run post-engagement debriefs and drive field learning back into product and platform priorities.
• Provide leadership, prioritization, and technical direction to the Forward Deployed Engineers and Customer Solutions Engineers assigned to your accounts.
• Lead executive communication with customer sponsors throughout the engagement lifecycle.
• Stay engaged after go-live on the technical outcome — adoption depth and scoping the next workflow. Sales owns the account relationship and review cadence.
• Partner with Sales on expansion: they lead the pursuit, you control what can be committed on scope, timeline, and capacity.
• Own the SOW Approval Gate on new and expansion business — no contract or SOW goes to a customer without your sign-off on scope, timeline, and capacity.
• Build reusable delivery patterns — templates, integration components, and reference architectures that make each subsequent engagement faster.
• Work with the account's Executive Advisor to bring domain expertise into scoping and validate outputs where correctness depends on it.

Qualifications

• 5+ years owning complex enterprise technical deployments end to end — as a forward deployed engineer, technical program manager, solutions architect, or delivery lead at a technical consultancy or enterprise software company.
• Technical fluency: enough depth in cloud architecture, APIs, data pipelines, and integration patterns to scope work credibly and direct engineers without needing translation. Engineering or technical background required.
• Scope discipline: demonstrated ability to hold a line against pressure from senior stakeholders, and the judgment to know when holding is right.
• Written communication and document hygiene: scopes, exit criteria, and decisions live in writing, not in your head.
• Executive presence: credible in the room with VP- and C-level customer sponsors at large enterprises.
• Comfort with ambiguity: our customers often don't know their highest-value use case when we arrive, and finding it is part of the job.

Preferred/Bonus Skills

• Experience with on-premise, VPC, or air-gapped deployments in regulated industries — pharma, life sciences, financial services, or government.
• Familiarity with GxP, HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar compliance and validation frameworks.
• Background at a company running a forward deployed engineering model.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML workflows, model deployment, or agent orchestration.
• Track record turning one-off engagements into repeatable delivery motions.

What Makes You A Great Fit

• You measure success by whether the customer is actually using what you built — not whether it shipped.
• You'd rather say no early than deliver a bloated engagement late.
• You're energized by walking into a messy enterprise environment and finding the one workflow that matters most.
• You're comfortable being the most senior person in the room on delivery, and the person accountable when it goes sideways.
• You want to build the function, not just work in it — this is the first Customer Delivery Lead at Salt, and the patterns you set become how we operate.
• You're excited to apply your skills to AI in life sciences and support teams doing high-impact scientific work.

Benefits

• Competitive salary based on location and experience.
• Comprehensive health coverage, including medical, dental, mental health.
• Fully remote role, collaborating primarily within U.S. time zones.