Engagement Manager, Chanakya

About the role

Description from the employer’s posting. Check the employer’s page for the current version.

About Sarvam

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

Engagement Manager is a senior client-facing role in the vertical. You own pipeline development, account strategy, and long-term engagement management. This is a builder role for someone who understands the procurement landscape, can engage at the CXO and technical leadership level, and can convert complex AI capability into funded, deployable programmes.

What You'll Do

• Own the day-to-day management of active client engagements, from scoping and alignment through to operational handover and adoption

• Serve as the primary point of contact for clients across the engagement lifecycle; manage expectations proactively and honestly

• Translate client operational problems into precise briefs that deployment and engineering teams can act on

• Track delivery against commitments; surface risks early and drive resolution without waiting for escalation

• Work with Strategic Deployment Engineers to ensure what is being built reflects what the client actually needs

• Support pipeline development: account mapping, stakeholder outreach, and PoC scoping

• Build and maintain working relationships with mid-to-senior client stakeholders; grow account depth over time

• Surface ground-level observations back to the vertical as market intelligence

What We're Looking For

• 4–6 years of professional experience; foundational background at a top-tier consulting firm strongly preferred — with a track record of owning complex analytical work, structuring ambiguous problems, and being accountable for outcomes

• At least 2 years in strategic or complex enterprise GTM, account management, or programme delivery — where you owned client relationships, not just supported them

• Comfort operating in long-cycle, relationship-driven environments where trust is built over months, not deals

• Strong written and verbal communication, able to hold a room with senior stakeholders and write briefs that people act on

• Familiarity with GenAI or ML concepts sufficient to engage credibly with technical teams and translate capability to clients

• Experience in or adjacent to defence, government, critical infrastructure and complex enterprises is a plus

Signals We Look For

• You've owned something - a client, a mandate - and driven it to a conclusion without being

managed to do it

• You've had to deliver a hard message to a client or stakeholder, done it early, and held the

relationship

• You think in structures. You make complex problems legible and actionable for the people who

need to move on them

• You've worked across functions — engineering, finance, policy, or operations — and made thing happen without formal authority

• Experience at a top-tier consulting firm; owning complex analytical problem-solving, structuring ambiguous mandates, and being accountable for outcomes is strongly valued.

Who You Are

• You treat client ownership as a baseline, not a virtue — if the engagement is in trouble, it's your problem to fix

• You are direct; you say what you actually think, including to people more senior than you

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and genuinely energised by environments where the answer isn't obvious

• You move with urgency and bring others with you through influence, not authority

Why Sarvam?

Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar

• High ownership and high impact, from day one

• Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems

• You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates

If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.