Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment

Responsibilities

• Deploy with customers on site globally, with a minimum expectation of 50% travel, supporting installation, configuration, validation, training, troubleshooting, and sustainment of Hivemind products.
• Become an expert user of the Hivemind Enterprise software stack, autonomy modules, deployment tooling, supported configurations, and diagnostic workflows.
• Execute and improve deployment runbooks covering software installation, version and configuration validation, licensing or provisioning status, pre-mission checks, log readiness, and acceptance steps.
• Provide hands-on technical support to customer operators, maintainers, partners, and internal field teams during deployment, test, training, demonstration, and sustainment windows.
• Capture and organize field evidence for triage, including logs, telemetry, recorded data, screenshots, version and configuration state, asset context, operator notes, mission phase, and environmental constraints.
• Drive issues through intake, severity assessment, ownership, workaround or fix delivery, customer-safe status updates, closure, and the learning loop.
• Convert recurring field issues, workarounds, customer questions, and training gaps into support tickets, knowledge-base content, known-issue records, runbooks, and product feedback.
• Partner with engineering, product, program, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, commercial, and support teams to route issues to the right owner.
• Support root-cause investigation and corrective-action validation by reproducing issues, collecting field context, testing updates, and confirming fixes or workarounds.
• Support Field Service Representative-style obligations when required, including on-site support, issue intake, operator assistance, troubleshooting, documentation, escalation, and evidence capture.

Example Projects

• Deploy Hivemind software and autonomy capabilities during customer integration events, exercises, test campaigns, demonstrations, or operational support windows.
• Build deployment-to-sustainment handoff packages with supported baselines, configuration checklists, evidence checklists, known issues, escalation contacts, and training material.
• Establish repeatable support flows for field issues, including a support hub, severity model, ownership routes, and closure loop.
• Troubleshoot field behavior across software, autonomy, networking, telemetry, configuration, sensors, operator workflows, and customer-environment constraints.
• Create customer-safe documentation that helps operators and maintainers self-serve routine issues while preserving escalation paths for mission-critical problems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in field engineering, forward-deployed engineering, applications engineering, systems integration, flight test, robotics support, unmanned systems operations, technical operations, customer deployment, or a similar hands-on technical role.
• Strong technical background in software engineering, systems integration, or autonomy-adjacent systems.
• Proficiency writing, reading, and debugging modern C++ code.
• Working proficiency with Python, Bash, or similar scripting for diagnostics, automation, data handling, and field-support workflows.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across Linux or embedded systems, networking, configuration management, logs, telemetry, release packages, sensors or payloads, and operator workflows.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, training, expectation-management, and escalation skills in customer-facing environments.
• Ability to write clear field notes, deployment records, troubleshooting guides, evidence packages, and support updates.
• Willingness and ability to travel at least 50% of the time, including frequent domestic and international travel and multi-week deployments.
• Ability to operate professionally in lab, flight-test, range, customer-site, and field environments under time pressure.
• Ability to comply with export-control, security, safety, sensitive-data, customer-site, and mission-specific operating requirements.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with autonomy, robotics, defense aviation, unmanned aircraft, deployed defense systems, flight test, payload integration, sensors, operator systems, or edge-compute environments.
• Experience supporting defense, government, allied, or international customers in operational, test, training, or overseas environments.
• Experience building or scaling a support, field-service, customer-success, sustainment, or applications-engineering function during an early product rollout.
• Experience with enterprise software deployment, customer support, licensing, provisioning, release management, configuration baselines, or offline/air-gapped operating environments.
• Hands-on experience with recorded-data analysis, diagnostic tooling, telemetry review, networking tools, system health checks, or support automation.
• FAA Part 107, military aviation or maintenance background, UAS operator experience, flight-test experience, systems engineering experience, or prior Field Service Representative experience.
• Experience using GenAI tools for troubleshooting, documentation, knowledge capture, data review, or support workflow automation.
• Active or prior security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one when required.

Compensation

• Annual salary: $150,000–$230,000.