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Forward-Deployed Strategist

Updated

$145,000–$225,000San Francisco, CAOn-site

The Forward-Deployed Strategist leads enterprise customer engagements that connect Workhelix’s AI and data insights to quantified business outcomes.

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View posting at Workhelix

At a glance

Posted base pay

$145K–$225KLevel with the median

The work

Plans what the customer deploys first

Balance

  1. Mostly building
  2. Mixed
  3. Mostly pre-sales or support

Project stages

  1. Pre-sales
  2. Proof of concept
  3. Implementation
  4. Operations

Travel Up to 25%

Coding
Configuration only
Builds for
External customers
Level
Senior
Role
Technical lead

What they ask for

Experience

  • 6+ yearsclient-facing roles, particularly strategy, consulting, SaaS customer-facing environments, customer success, implementation, professional services, or similar

Background

  • Solutions and customer engineering
  • Implementation and data engineering
  • Consulting

Tools

  • Workhelix Nucleus
  • SQL
  • Python
  • GenAI
  • data science

Less common in FDE jobs

  • Coding work: Configuration only13%
  • Covers pre-sales26%
  • On-site37%
  • Covers proofs of concept40%

Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.

The job description from Workhelix

Posted by Workhelix on

Who We Are

Workhelix is an enterprise SaaS company with a single goal: helping organizations get the most out of their AI investments.

Our people and software combine to give leaders answers to the three critical questions about the business value of AI:

  • Where are our top opportunities to create value with AI?
  • Are our current efforts actually delivering? What’s their ROI?
  • How can we accelerate and increase the benefits of our AI?

To find answers for each customer, Workhelix applies our unmatched expertise in economics, AI, and data science. We have pioneered a task-scoring method to identify top GenAI opportunities, ensuring clear, data-driven deployment strategies. Our ROI monitoring suite applies Nobel Prize-winning economics to provide accurate, ongoing insights into the impact of GenAI implementations. Renowned AI and Economics thinkers including Andrew Ng, and cofounders Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson stand proudly behind our mission.

We maintain a culture established on five key principles. For more information on our leadership principles, please visit the careers page of our website.

Role

At Workhelix, the Forward-Deployed Strategist is pivotal in transforming complex business challenges into actionable solutions. You'll be the bridge between customer needs, data insights, and service execution, ensuring that organizations can make better, faster, and smarter decisions with our expertise. This role combines analytical problem-solving, deep user empathy, and strategic execution.

Key Responsibilities

  • Engage deeply with customers to understand their strategic goals, operational challenges, and data landscapes.
  • Identify critical workflows and data sources that drive AI adoption and business transformation.
  • Build quantified business cases that connect Workhelix insights to measurable customer outcomes - giving client executives a clear, defensible case for action.
  • Spearhead client workstreams with our Engineering and Product teams to design and deploy scalable, customized solutions that meet client needs.
  • Lead customer onboarding and enablement sessions to the Workhelix Nucleus platform to ensure adoption and empower users to generate actionable insights.
  • Present data-driven insights and strategic recommendations to client executives, ensuring alignment on value realization.
  • Work cross-functionally to influence product enhancements based on field insights.
  • Scope new and expansion engagement opportunities and assess how Workhelix can drive transformation across diverse industries.
  • Work closely with sales colleagues to continuously deliver value for the customer and grow the ACV for Workhelix.
  • Drive execution by running SteerCo meetings, managing agendas, documenting decisions, and sharing clear follow-ups to keep projects on track.
  • Bring structure to ambiguous environments by organizing workstreams, maintaining alignment across stakeholders, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

What We Value

  • Analytical thinkers who can hold their own with data and engineering teams and who know how to translate a finding into something an executive can act on.
  • Customer-centric problem solvers who dig past what a client explicitly asks for to understand what they actually need, and who bring structure to messy, ambiguous situations without being told what to look for.
  • Product-minded, even without the title. You have a strong sense of what's worth building and can prioritize customer requests in a way that keeps trust intact, even when the answer is no.
  • Outcome-driven people. You don't stop at the insight, you translate it into a quantified business case that gives a customer's leadership a concrete reason to act.
  • Low-ego and highly accountable people. When something goes wrong in front of a client, you own it, fix it, and move on rather than pointing to the work you did.
  • Proactive learners who get up to speed in unfamiliar domains without waiting to be taught, and who find shifting scope energizing rather than destabilizing.
  • Natural relationship builders across functions. You can align engineering, data science, product, and sales toward a shared outcome without having formal authority over any of them.
  • People comfortable driving change without direct authority. You can diagnose why adoption is stalling inside a client organization and create pull rather than waiting for someone to ask.
  • Builders of process, not just followers of it. You're comfortable designing an operating rhythm from scratch: agendas, documentation, follow-through.
  • Exceptional communicators who read a room and adjust instinctively, whether it's a Head of Engineering, a CIO, or a CFO on the other side of the table.
  • Meticulous individuals. You catch the small thing in a deliverable or a follow-up email before it becomes the client's reason to lose confidence.

What you bring

  • 6+ years of experience in client-facing roles, particularly in strategy, consulting, SaaS customer-facing environments (e.g., customer success, implementation, or professional services), or similar, with experience coordinating internal engineering and data science teams.
  • A demonstrated ability to deliver results in complex organizational environments like B2B enterprise.
  • Experience building quantified business cases, or a demonstrated ability to pick this up quickly, translating an insight into something a customer's finance or executive stakeholders will act on.
  • Comfort navigating complex data ecosystems and identifying insights that drive business value. You don't need to be a SQL or Python practitioner, but you need to think quantitatively and know how to credibly translate into customer insights.
  • Experience developing novel, software-led solutions to drive business outcomes for enterprise customers.
  • A track record of driving adoption and behavior change with stakeholders you don't formally manage.
  • Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to shift register across technical and executive audiences.
  • Comfort with ad-hoc data analysis.
  • Ability to travel (up to ~25%) as required by client and business needs.
  • Based in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area for in-office collaboration.

Nice to have

  • Working SQL proficiency
  • Prior experience in an early-stage, high-growth SaaS environment.
  • Experience building or scaling internal processes from scratch in an ambiguous org.
  • Experience working with SaaS sales teams and a history of recognizing expansion opportunities.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days

  • You understand the Workhelix product and methodology and can confidently answer common customer questions.
  • You understand how we engage customers across pilot and pull engagements, including how Forward-Deployed Strategists collaborate with Sales, Product, and Engineering.
  • You understand how Workhelix creates value for customers and can clearly articulate our value proposition.

By 60 days

  • You are running customer engagements end-to-end, effectively coordinating customer stakeholders and internal resources.
  • You are identifying meaningful product signals from customers and bringing those insights back to Product and Sales while advocating for customer needs.
  • You can tell a compelling, data-driven story to customer stakeholders at multiple levels—from managers and directors to the C-suite—and clearly articulate the value Workhelix is delivering.

By 90 days

  • You are independently managing a portfolio of customer accounts and driving engagements forward with minimal oversight.
  • You are identifying and deploying novel solutions that help customers get more value from their AI investments.
  • You are proactively identifying opportunities for additional value and engaging customers in expansion and renewal conversations.

Pay range and compensation package $145,000- $225,000 + Equity + Health Benefits

What You’ll Get

  • Competitive compensation package and benefits.
  • Chance to learn and collaborate with some of the most famous researchers in the AI and digital economy space: Andrew Ng, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee, and Daniel Rock.
  • The unique opportunity to help build a company, culture, and products from the ground up with a team that values healthy working practices.
  • A high-trust, high-autonomy work environment.

At Workhelix, we stand committed to ensuring an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available without any discrimination. We believe diversity is critical to our success. Selection for employment will solely be based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We encourage all qualified individuals to apply!

View posting at Workhelix

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Pay and conditions

Posted pay
$145,000–$225,000
Pay details

Pay range and compensation package $145,000- $225,000 + Equity + Health Benefits

Location
San Francisco, CA
Work arrangement
On-site
Travel
Up to 25%
Experience requirements
  • 6+ years: client-facing roles, particularly strategy, consulting, SaaS customer-facing environments, customer success, implementation, professional services, or similar (required)