SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
First Resonance builds ION Factory OS, an operating system for next-generation manufacturing serving aerospace, defense, clean energy, robotics, and autonomous vehicle companies. The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function bridges product, customers, and commercial outcomes by working inside complex manufacturing environments to solve operational problems, deploy software, and drive customer value.
You will lead and scale the FDE function as both a technical and people leader. Your responsibilities include:
- Building and leading an exceptional FDE team: hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers across levels; set clear expectations; provide direct feedback; and create meaningful paths for technical and leadership growth.
- Owning the deployment portfolio: set priorities, staffing, capacity, milestones, and risk management across concurrent customer engagements to ensure high-quality delivery and measurable outcomes.
- Raising the technical and delivery bar: establish standards for discovery, architecture, implementation, testing, go-live, documentation, production support, and deployment reviews.
- Leading critical customer moments: serve as executive and technical escalation point for strategic deployments, complex integrations, production incidents, and high-stakes tradeoffs.
- Connecting delivery to growth: partner with Sales and Customer Success on technical discovery, scoping, expansion strategy, and account planning so FDE capacity drives durable adoption and revenue.
- Turning field learning into leverage: create feedback loops with Product and Engineering to productize repeatable solutions, improve FDE tooling, and evolve the team's operating model as the company scales.
You will lead through managers and senior individual contributors while remaining close enough to the work to recognize strong architecture, challenge assumptions, and guide the team in unfamiliar customer environments.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or enterprise implementation, including 3+ years managing engineers.
- Track record of building and developing high-performing technical teams while improving delivery predictability and engineering quality.
- 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: ability to align customers and internal leaders, manage scope and risk, and connect technical choices to adoption, expansion, and revenue.
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.
