Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering

Posit PBC is looking for a hands-on, operationally-minded Sr Manager to lead and scale the core post-sales technical functions. As a key leader in the Solutions Engineering organization, you will sit at the intersection of customer onboarding, technical solutioning, and scoped delivery — turning complex customer challenges into repeatable, high-quality outcomes.

This is not a passive management role. You are a builder who can develop your team, drive process consistency, and get into the details when it matters. You are also a systems thinker when it comes to technology — including AI tools — and how it can reduce manual effort, accelerate delivery, and help invent new ways to serve customers. You care about delivering measurable value to customers and have the technical credibility to earn the trust of both your team and the customers they serve.

At Posit, we value authenticity and technical curiosity. We're looking for someone who has seen what "good" looks like in a Professional Services organization and is ready to build it here in a new way — with a team that genuinely cares about helping customers succeed with open-source data science tools. 

Key Responsibilities

You will oversee the strategy, day-to-day execution, and performance of the following functions:

Solutions Engineering: Lead a team of Solutions Engineers who serve as the technical bridge between Posit's product capabilities and customer outcomes. Your SEs will support complex deployments, guide customers through architecture decisions, and develop repeatable solution frameworks for common use cases — including AI-assisted workflows and LLM-powered analytics patterns where relevant.

Delivery & Technical Escalations: Manage a high-impact team focused on scoped engagements (SOWs), specific use-case deployments, and critical account-level technical escalations. Ensure delivery is profitable, scalable, and that escalation insights are fed back into the organization.

You will also work collaboratively with CS leadership to evolve an effective customer experience through the evolution of team structures, workflows, and tools.

What You'll Own

Operational Excellence: Build and maintain playbooks, processes, and quality standards across the functions you lead while always considering the impact and intersection with the full customer journey. Convert ad-hoc "heroic" efforts into repeatable, measurable delivery.

Team Performance: Hire, coach, and develop individual contributors and team leads. Build a culture of proactive customer partnership and continuous improvement.

KPI Ownership: Define and track key metrics including Time-to-Value, CSAT, utilization, and project delivery quality. Use data to identify bottlenecks and drive improvements.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Sales, Customer Success, TAM, and Product/Engineering teams to ensure seamless hand-offs, aligned customer journeys, and a strong feedback loop from the field to the product.

Escalation Management: Serve as a senior point of escalation for delivery issues. Stabilize at-risk engagements and ensure lessons learned improve future delivery.

AI & Modern Tooling Adoption: Enable the use of AI tools and automation across your teams — from AI-assisted scoping and documentation to LLM-powered customer workflows. Identify where modern technology can eliminate repetitive work, shorten delivery cycles, and help customers unlock new use cases with Posit products.

What You Bring:

Experience: Extensive experience in Professional Services, Solutions Engineering, or a related post-sales technical function, including demonstrated success managing teams in a B2B enterprise software environment.

Technical Domain: Hands-on experience with complex on-premise or hybrid deployments. Familiarity with the analytics, reporting, or data science software landscape is a strong plus.

Operational Mindset: Demonstrated ability to build processes, write playbooks, and scale delivery — not just manage individuals.

Delivery Track Record: Experience scoping and delivering SOW-based engagements. Comfort with project economics, capacity planning, and managing to utilization targets.

Solutions Orientation: Ability to connect customer problems to platform capabilities, and to develop frameworks that help SEs do the same at scale.

AI & Modern Technology Fluency: You actively use AI tools (e.g., coding assistants, LLM-powered workflows, automation) in your own work and understand where they create real leverage vs. hype. You can evaluate AI use cases critically, help your team adopt new tools confidently, and guide customers in applying AI to their analytics and data science workflows. You are a systems thinker, and strive to leverage technology not just to impact individual tasks, but how those tasks work in concert with how the business runs and results are achieved.

Coaching & Development: A manager who grows people, not just manages tasks. You invest in your team's career development and technical depth — including keeping them current on emerging tools and AI capabilities.

Adaptability: You thrive in an ever-changing environment and can shape strategies and systems that keep pace with the growth of the business

Growth Mindset: You are naturally curious and are willing to try new things in order to experience and learn

Mission-Driven: Alignment with Posit's mission to support open-source software and the data science community.

Impact Plan

Within 30 Days: Discovery & Listening

• Get to know your team and understand their perspective and history of the organization.
• Audit existing workflows across Onboarding, Solutions Engineering, and Delivery to identify bottlenecks and gaps.
• Shadow team members in customer engagements to understand the current "technical journey" of a Posit customer.
• Establish key relationships with Sales, Customer Success, TAM, and Product/Engineering leadership.
• Review existing KPIs and the data inputs that support them.
• Inventory current AI and automation tool usage (or absence) across the three teams.

Within 60 Days: Strategic Assessment

• Develop a baseline for "Time-to-Value" and "Project Duration" metrics across all onboarding segments.
• Map the current Solutions Engineering engagement model — identify gaps in tooling, frameworks, and repeatability.
• Audit the active Delivery pipeline: assess project health, scoping quality, and escalation patterns.
• Identify the top three process improvements most likely to improve customer outcomes and team efficiency.
• Surface two to three specific opportunities where AI or automation could meaningfully reduce manual effort or accelerate delivery.

Within 120 Days: Execution & Optimization

• Roll out an updated playbook that standardizes the first 90-day experience across customer segments.
• Implement a Solutions Engineering framework: reusable architectures, demo assets, and qualification criteria for common use cases — including AI-assisted analytics patterns.
• Optimize the Delivery scoping process to improve profitability and reduce delivery variance.
• Establish a closed-loop escalation process that routes insights from technical escalations back to Product and Engineering.
• Pilot at least one AI-assisted workflow within the team (e.g., automated documentation, AI-assisted scoping templates, LLM-powered customer diagnostics) and define a path to broader rollout.