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Salary: USD 225,000 - 275,000 / annual
Viam is a robotics engineering platform founded by Eliot Horowitz (co-founder and former CTO of MongoDB) that enables engineers to configure, control, and manage robots intuitively. The company is ~100 people strong, headquartered in NYC.
You will lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team responsible for getting Viam's customers into production. This is a leadership role for someone who remains technical—you'll manage five engineers working across strategic accounts, own the technical approach to each deployment, and serve as the senior technical partner to customers' engineering and operations leaders.
Key responsibilities include:
- Managing a team of five forward deployed engineers: coaching, performance management, hiring, and resource allocation across accounts
- Owning the technical approach across deployments and making architecture and prioritization decisions
- Serving as the senior technical voice with customer leadership from kickoff through escalation
- Working with Viam leadership on account direction, keeping them current on progress, risks, and blockers
- Driving deployments to production: maintaining schedules, unblocking obstacles, and adapting approach as needed
- Translating field learnings into platform priorities with Product and Engineering teams
You should bring experience managing engineers who deploy software in customer environments, deep systems expertise, and the ability to get fluent in unfamiliar platforms quickly. You'll review designs and read code but won't code day-to-day. You need judgment across systems integration, SDKs, and edge/cloud architectures, including understanding failure modes with unreliable networks and hardware. A track record with enterprise customers and credibility to have difficult conversations with their leadership is essential. You should be comfortable deciding with incomplete information, building structure from scratch in bespoke environments, and balancing individual customer urgency against portfolio-wide scalability. Prior robotics or IoT experience is not required, but comfort with hardware and physical systems is important.
The role is hybrid (3 days/week in NYC office) with occasional travel to customer sites.
