Three roles that get confused
- Solutions engineer. Pre-sale. Runs demos and proofs of concept, answers the technical questions that close the deal, and hands a scoped plan to implementation.
- Implementation manager or lead. Post-sale. Owns the project plan, the customer's stakeholders and the go-live date. Technical enough to configure the product and read an API doc; not usually writing production code.
- Forward deployed engineer. Post-sale and hands-on. Writes the integration code when the product needs real engineering to fit the customer. See our guide to hiring FDEs.
Early-stage companies often hire one person to cover all three. That works until the second or third enterprise customer, when the pre-sale and post-sale work start competing for the same hours.
When to make this hire
- Customers are signing but taking months to reach first value.
- The founders or account executives are running onboarding themselves.
- Engineers are fielding customer configuration questions during sprints.
- Renewal conversations are starting before the customer is fully live.
What strong candidates look like
- Implementation, onboarding, customer engineering or solutions titles at a B2B software company with a product that required real setup.
- Clear examples of a project they rescued, with specifics on what was wrong and what they changed.
- Comfort with data: they can read a schema, run a query, and spot when the customer's export is going to break the import.
- Steadiness. This role absorbs customer frustration daily; look for people who stay calm and keep a plan moving.
How to interview
- Project walk-through. One implementation from kickoff to go-live, including a stakeholder who went quiet or a timeline that slipped.
- Scoping exercise. Give them a realistic customer brief and ask for a project plan with milestones, risks and the questions they would ask on day one.
- Technical comfort check. Hands-on time with your product or a sandbox, plus a few questions about how they would debug a failed data load.
- Customer simulation. An unhappy customer whose launch date just moved. Watch for empathy, clarity and control of the conversation.
Mistakes we see most
- Hiring a customer success manager for an implementation seat. Relationship skills are necessary but not sufficient when the product needs configuring.
- Hiring for a specific prior product. Implementation skill transfers across products faster than most founders expect.
- Not defining the handoff from sales. The best candidate will ask; have an answer.
- Measuring on activity instead of time to value and expansion.
How we run the search
We work mostly in San Francisco and New York, where the enterprise AI companies and their implementation talent are concentrated. After a short intake we source from people we already know, talk to each one about your product and customers, and send a short list of candidates with a plain read on fit. Fees are paid by the company. Candidates never pay.
Common questions
What is the difference between implementation and customer success?
Implementation owns the project from signature to go-live: configuration, data, training and the launch date. Customer success owns the relationship after go-live: adoption, renewal and expansion. At complex products the implementation seat is more technical.
Should solutions engineers report to sales or to product?
Pre-sale solutions engineers usually report into sales or a revenue leader. Implementation and post-sale roles typically report into customer or operations leadership. Reporting into engineering tends to pull them away from customers.
How technical does an implementation manager need to be?
Comfortable with data and configuration: reading a schema, running SQL, following an API document, and diagnosing a failed import. They do not need to write production code; that is the forward deployed engineer's job.
Do you place implementation roles remotely?
Some companies allow it, but most of our clients want implementation and solutions hires in or near San Francisco or New York because the work involves time with customers and with the product team.
Written by Sam Kwak, founder of Technical Recruiters. Last updated 2026-10-06.