Onsite Engineering Manager (Robotics)

Location: On-site in Normal, IL, United States

Company

hirify.global is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, starting with factory-floor robotics.

What you will do

• Lead and grow an onsite team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Software Engineers, including hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, performance management, and coverage across customer operating hours.
• Own the reliability of critical robot data collection devices, including uptime, data-capture, and time-to-resolution targets, dashboards, and operational reviews.
• Set onsite technical standards for provisioning, diagnostics, networking, repeatable device bring-up, runbooks, and postmortems.
• Own the senior technical relationship with the customer by scoping requests, communicating incidents and timelines, and managing difficult conversations.
• Run escalations into HQ engineering, deciding what is handled in the field versus fixed in the product and representing field needs in roadmap prioritization.
• Stay hands-on with device, network, and deployment problems; build and review pull requests and lead trialing and testing of images, bug fixes, and feature work with offsite teams.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience managing engineers in field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform teams, including hiring, coaching, and supporting growth.
• Deep hands-on troubleshooting experience with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware, with enough depth to review engineering diagnoses.
• Working knowledge of Linux system administration and Bash or Python, including the ability to read systemd units, provisioning scripts, and tcpdump captures.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, and firewall rules, with the judgment to distinguish internal issues from customer-network issues.
• Customer-facing maturity and the ability to manage outage and delivery-date conversations while maintaining the relationship.
• Self-direction to run a site away from HQ and discipline to keep HQ informed proactively.

Nice to have

• Experience establishing or scaling a forward deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team.
• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role.
• Familiarity with fleet and infrastructure tooling such as Docker, Portainer, Ansible, Grafana, Prometheus, and remote device management.
• Background in robotics deployment, computer vision systems, IP cameras, or industrial IoT.
• Experience running incident response and postmortem practices across a distributed fleet.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on work with physical AI and real-world industrial robotics.
• Onsite collaboration with a key customer and close coordination with HQ and offsite engineering teams.
• Ownership of both fleet reliability and the engineers responsible for keeping the deployment running.