Director Forward Deployed Engineering

About the Role

Hybrid 3 days/week in NYC office, with occasional travel to customer sites

We're looking for a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to lead the team responsible for getting Viam's customers into production. You'll manage a team of five engineers working across our most strategic accounts, own the technical approach to each deployment, and serve as the senior technical partner to our customers' engineering and operations leaders.

This is a leadership role for someone who is still technical. You'll spend your time on architecture decisions, design reviews, coaching, and customer conversations. Prior professional robotics experience isn't required, but you should be comfortable around hardware and physical systems, and able to get fluent in a new platform quickly.

What you’ll own:

• Manage a team of five forward deployed engineers: coaching, performance, hiring, and how they are resourced across accounts.
• Own the technical approach across deployments and make the architecture and prioritization calls.
• Be the senior technical voice with customer leadership, from kickoff through escalation.
• Work with Viam leadership on account direction, and keep them current on progress, risks, and blockers.
• Drive deployments to production: hold the schedule, unblock what's stuck, and change approach when a site demands it.
• Turn field learnings into platform priorities with Product and Engineering.

What you bring:

• Experience managing engineers who deploy software in customer environments.
• Deep systems experience and the ability to get fluent in an unfamiliar platform quickly. You can review a design and read code, though you won't be coding day to day.
• Judgment across systems integration, SDKs, and edge/cloud architectures, including what breaks when networks and hardware are unreliable.
• A track record with enterprise customers, including the credibility to hold a hard conversation with their leadership.
• Comfort deciding with incomplete information and owning the outcome.
• Experience building structure where none existed, in an environment where most of the work is still bespoke.
• Willingness to balance one customer's urgency against what scales across the portfolio.

Experience with robotics or IoT is not required.

The salary for this role is between $225,000 - $300,000 /year.