Director of Customer Engineering at Motive – $317K OTE in Columbus

Who we are:

Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.

Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.

Visit gomotive.com to learn more.

About the Role:

Motive's Customer Engineering team is a post-sales technical solutions function for our largest, most strategic, and business-critical customers. As the Director, Customer Engineering, you'll lead and develop a team of Customer Engineers who turn difficult operational problems into working solutions using Motive's products, supported APIs, data, reporting, and automation.

You'll combine people leadership, technical judgment, and customer-facing problem solving to help the team deliver measurable customer value. You'll establish how the team prioritizes engagements, maintain a high bar for solution quality, and ensure successful customer work becomes reusable expertise for Motive's customers and broader Solutions Engineering organization.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you'll help the team solve meaningful customer problems, validate what works, drive lasting customer value, and ensure clear ownership after handoff.

What You'll Do:

• Lead and develop Customer Engineers, setting clear expectations for technical quality, customer accountability, collaboration, documentation, and measurable outcomes.
• Build a culture of technical curiosity, practical problem solving, thoughtful prioritization, and reusable knowledge.
• Prioritize strategic customer engagements where solution work can increase realized value, resolve operational gaps, reduce displacement risk, or support broader adoption.
• Ensure each engagement has a clear business problem, customer sponsor, feasible solution path, success measures, and owner after handoff.
• Join the most complex customer engagements to guide discovery, solution design, technical validation, stakeholder alignment, and outcome measurement.
• Define and evolve the team's engagement model, intake process, capacity planning, technical standards, delivery expectations, and handoff practices; establish an operating cadence for reviewing progress, capacity, quality, and outcomes.
• Measure solutions delivered and adopted, documented customer value, recurring technical barriers removed, reusable solution patterns, customer-backed product insights, and contribution to retention or expansion.
• Connect customer-validated needs and technical evidence to Product and Engineering, partner with Customer Success, Implementation, Sales, account teams, and presales Solutions Engineering to coordinate ownership, and turn proven solutions into repeatable workflows, guidance, and enablement for the wider field.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years of experience leading and developing customer-facing technical professionals, with a track record of building team capability and maintaining high standards for delivery.
• Strong Solutions Engineering, technical consulting, post-sales engineering, or comparable customer-facing experience; you understand the difference between demonstrating a solution and delivering one.
• Credible technical depth in enterprise SaaS, API-based capabilities, data analysis, automation, integrations, advanced product configuration, and troubleshooting product behavior.
• Experience turning ambiguous customer problems into delivered solutions with clear adoption and measurable business results.
• Ability to coach practitioners through customer discovery, technical problem solving, stakeholder management, solution validation, and evidence-backed documentation.
• Strong judgment about priorities, scope, supportability, and talent development.
• Ability to work directly with customer executives, IT leaders, frontline operators, and account stakeholders while influencing internal Product and Engineering teams.
• Experience establishing operating models, engagement rules, prioritization frameworks, delivery standards, or other mechanisms that help a technical function scale.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to create clarity across Customer Success, Implementation, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, and Engineering.
• Fleet management, transportation, safety, telematics, IoT, or other physical-operations industry experience is preferred.

Pay Transparency
Your compensation may be based on several factors, including education, work experience, and certifications. For certain roles, total compensation may include restricted stock units. Motive offers benefits including health, pharmacy, optical and dental care benefits, paid time off, sick time off, short term and long term disability coverage, life insurance as well as 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Learn more about our benefits by visiting Motive Perks & Benefits.

The on-target earnings (base pay + commissions) for this role:

$231,000 — $317,000 USD

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

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The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.

Regarding US-based roles, depending on your role and primary work location, Motive Technologies, Inc. ("Employer") discloses candidates may be required to execute a non-compete covenant with the Employer. This requirement does not apply to lawyers, interns, or employees working in CA, MN, MT, ND, OK, or where otherwise prohibited by law.

Non-compete covenant terms in all other jurisdictions will be subject to the applicable statutory requirements, including but not limited to, procedures, industry related prohibitions, or salary and compensation thresholds.

All job postings are for existing vacancies. Please note; some interviews or new-hire training sessions may be held in person at one of our global offices.