About this role
Requisition ID: 44034
Job Description
In every role, McCainers are ambitious, curious, and passionate about creating exceptional work experiences - together. With a customer-first mindset, we make doing business with McCain easy.
About the role
- The FDE Commercial Lead establishes and maintains the standard of excellence for McCain's Forward Deployed Engineering practice.
- Reporting to the VP, Artificial Intelligence, this role leads the development, deployment, and performance of the FDE community supporting McCain's AI portfolio across Snacking, Manufacturing, Cross-functional, and Data and AI use cases.
- This is a hands-on player-coach role.
- In addition to developing senior practitioners and managing the portfolio FDE pool, you will personally participate in selected AI engagements, helping teams translate complex business needs into scalable solutions and measurable outcomes.
- You will also partner with the FDEs supporting Commercial, Marketing, and Manufacturing to strengthen standards and practices without managing their day-to-day delivery.
- In this hands-on capacity, you will design, build, test, and deploy agentic AI solutions and supporting tools that enable AI agents to reason, orchestrate workflows, interact with enterprise systems and data, and complete defined business tasks.
- You will help move these solutions from early prototypes into secure, scalable, production-ready capabilities.
- What you'll be doing.
- Personally design, build, test, and deploy agentic AI solutions and reusable tools for selected Commercial and enterprise use casesDevelop AI agents and multi-agent workflows that combine reasoning, orchestration, enterprise data, knowledge sources, APIs, and business systems to execute defined tasks and support measurable business outcomes.
- Build rapid prototypes and production-ready capabilities, working closely with AI Platform and Engineering and Knowledge Engineering to ensure solutions are secure, scalable, observable, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise architectureEstablish practical engineering patterns for agent evaluation, tool integration, human oversight, monitoring, failure handling, and continuous improvement, and embed those patterns into the broader FDE practice.
- Establish and maintain McCain's FDE skill standards, role definition, career pathways, and development practices.
- Build and strengthen the FDE community through coaching, mentoring, calibration, and structured feedback.
- Lead hiring, assignment, performance management, and professional development for the portfolio FDE pool.
- Assign FDEs to portfolio clusters based on business priorities, practitioner capabilities, and individual development objectives.
- Personally lead one or two selected portfolio engagements per quarter, modeling the delivery practices and outcome accountability expected across the FDE community.
- Embed alongside FDEs in active use cases to provide in-the-moment coaching and strengthen execution.
- Partner with the FDEs supporting Commercial to promote consistent practices and standards while respecting their ownership of delivery.
- Collaborate with AI Platform and Engineering, Knowledge Engineering, AI Deployment and Enablement, and Use Case Governance and Operations leaders to enable effective execution.
- Develop reusable FDE playbooks, engagement patterns, and secondment agreements, including clear accountability for priorities, deliverables, technical craft, and standards.
- Represent the FDE practice with senior functional sponsors and executive leaders, helping resolve resource conflicts and advance business outcomes.
- Improve FDE effectiveness, use-case throughput, solution adoption, and measurable business value across the portfolio.
- Ensure all FDE-led engagements comply with McCain's security, governance, risk-classification, and Responsible AI standards.
What you'll need to be successful.B