Forward Deployed Engineering Leader

The role

You will lead and scale the Forward Deployed Engineering function. You will manage a team of engineers to turn operational problems into deployed software and customer value within manufacturing environments.

What you will do

• Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers
• Set priorities, staffing, capacity, milestones, and risk management for customer engagements
• Establish standards for discovery, architecture, implementation, testing, go-live, documentation, production support, and deployment reviews
• Serve as an executive and technical escalation point for strategic deployments and production incidents
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success on technical discovery, scoping, expansion strategy, and account planning
• Create a feedback loop with Product and Engineering to productize repeatable customer solutions
• Improve FDE tooling and automation
• Evolve the team operating model as the company scales

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or enterprise implementation
• 3+ years managing engineers
• Track record of building and developing high-performing technical teams
• Strong technical judgment across modern software systems, APIs, integrations, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, security, and production operations
• Experience owning a portfolio of complex, customer-facing technical programs from discovery through go-live and ongoing operation
• Executive-level communication and commercial judgment

Nice to have

• Experience leading forward deployed, solutions architecture, professional services, implementation engineering, or technical account teams
• Experience with manufacturing, aerospace, defense, energy, industrial software, ERP, PLM, MES, or other operationally complex domains
• Evidence of scaling a technical services or deployment function while increasing repeatability, margins, or revenue contribution
• Experience partnering with Product and Engineering to turn customer-specific work into reusable platform capabilities
• Familiarity with enterprise security, regulated environments, air-gapped networks, and high-availability production systems

Benefits

• Health Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance
• Paid Parental Leave
• Employee Stock Option Plan
• Team outings, group lunches, open office, happy hours
• Paid holidays, sick days
• Flexible Friday and PTO
• 401K

Before you apply

• New hire's Form I-9 information will be shared with the federal government to confirm they are authorized to work in the U.S.

About the company

First Resonance builds the ION Factory OS to power next-generation manufacturing for companies building rockets, satellites, eVTOLs, clean energy systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. They provide tools to manufacturing engineers and operators to improve hardware quality and delivery.