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Mind Robotics is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, starting with the factory floor. We are hiring an Onsite Engineering Manager to lead our forward-deployed and software engineering team at a key customer site in Normal, IL.
In this role, you will own two critical responsibilities: the health and uptime of our fleet of data collection devices, and the engineers who operate and maintain them. You will serve as the bridge between the customer and headquarters—the senior technical voice the customer trusts when systems fail, and the person who translates field pain into product roadmap priorities.
You will manage a small team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Software Engineers, own the escalation path into HQ engineering, and make decisions about what gets patched in the field versus fixed in the product. This is a hands-on management role: you might spend the morning reading logs alongside an engineer and the afternoon renegotiating deployment timelines with customer leadership.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow the onsite team through hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, performance management, and coverage planning across customer operating hours
- Own fleet reliability metrics: define uptime, data-capture, and time-to-resolution targets; run dashboards and reviews to track performance
- Set technical standards onsite for provisioning, diagnostics, and networking; establish runbooks, repeatable device bring-up procedures, and postmortems that drive closure
- Own the senior technical relationship with the customer: scope new requests, communicate incidents and timelines, and push back when requests don't fit
- Run the escalation path into HQ engineering: triage what the field absorbs versus what becomes a product fix; represent field needs in roadmap and prioritization
- Stay hands-on: when device, network, or deployment problems exceed the team's capacity, you jump in. You are comfortable coding and review PRs with your team
- Lead trials and testing of images, bug fixes, and feature development work with offsite teams to accelerate deployment of changes
Requirements:
- 3+ years managing engineers in field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform roles, including hiring, coaching, and growth
- Deep hands-on troubleshooting background with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware; sufficient depth to review an engineer's diagnosis independently
- Comfort with Linux system administration and Bash or Python; able to read systemd units, provisioning scripts, and tcpdump captures
- Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, firewall rules) and judgment to distinguish our problems from the customer's network issues
- Customer-facing maturity: ability to own difficult conversations about outages or slipped dates without damaging the relationship
- Self-direction to run a site independently from HQ, with discipline to keep HQ informed proactively
Nice-to-have experience:
- Standing up or scaling a forward-deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team
- Prior time as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role
- Fleet and infrastructure tooling: Docker, Portainer, Ansible, Grafana/Prometheus, remote device management
- Robotics deployment, computer vision systems, IP cameras, or industrial IoT
- Running incident response and postmortem practice across distributed fleets
