Distinguished Field Solutions Engineer

About the role

The Distinguished Field Solutions Engineer (AVP) is a leadership role within Cognizant's Technology & Engineering department, based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. This senior technical leader serves as the anchor for enterprise platform deals, driving technical wins across Cognizant AI Platforms through intense client-facing and market-facing engagement. Day-to-day, the role involves leading technical discovery, designing solution architectures, delivering demos and proofs of concept, shaping platform roadmaps, and managing a India-based PoC and Demo team. The position requires willingness to travel to client sites, studios, and industry events.

What you’ll do

• Lead technical strategy, influence platform roadmap, build PoC and Demo teams, and represent Cognizant in client and industry engagements.
• Partner with sales, account, and professional services teams as the technical lead on enterprise platform pursuits, owning the technical win from qualification to close.
• Run technical discovery to understand a client's engineering, AI, cloud, and operations landscape and map outcomes to the right platform or combination of platforms.
• Design and present solution architectures showing how platforms integrate with the client's existing tooling, hyperscaler footprint, and ecosystem partners.
• Build and deliver compelling, tailored demonstrations and drive proofs of concept and readiness assessments that de-risk adoption and prove value.
• Articulate commercial and delivery value of platforms, including chargeback, managed-services, and outcome-based models, and help quantify productivity, cost, and time-to-market benefits.
• Respond to technical sections of RFPs, RFIs, and bid processes, and shape proposals with credible, defensible solutioning.
• Represent platforms at industry events and conferences (e.g., AWS re:Invent, Google Next, Microsoft Ignite) and in cloud-marketplace and partner motions.

What you’ll bring

• 20+ years of software, AI, cloud or engineering experience with strong client-facing leadership and people management skills.
• Senior software or platform product engineer background (e.g., advisory/solutions engineer, developer advocate, or solution architect) with a decisive move into client-facing technical go-to-market le
• 20-25 years in software, AI, digital and cloud engineering, including 7+ years in advisory-led technical conversations with senior client engineers, architects, and C-suite technology leaders.
• Proven people-leadership experience building, managing, and developing technical teams (ideally PoC, demo, presales, or solutions-engineering teams).
• Minimum 2+ years hands-on across the AI-infused Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC), building agentic and gen-AI solutions.
• Working knowledge of key partner ecosystems including hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Google) and AI-native providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA) and surrounding AI/engineering tooling.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills to build and deliver demos and publish crisp communications and success stories.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, managing multiple pursuits, and collaborating across Commercial, Delivery, Marketing, Platform Engineering, and implementation teams.

Skills