Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment (Robotics)

Location: United States, San Diego, California, or Washington, DC; on-site with at least 50% travel, including domestic and international travel and multi-week deployments

Company

hirify.global builds intelligent systems, including Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, for service members and civilian protection.

What you will do

• Deploy with customers to install, configure, validate, train users on, troubleshoot, and sustain Hivemind products.
• Execute and improve deployment runbooks covering software installation, configuration validation, licensing or provisioning, pre-mission checks, logs, and acceptance steps.
• Provide hands-on technical support during deployments, tests, training events, demonstrations, and sustainment windows.
• Capture field evidence such as logs, telemetry, recorded data, screenshots, configuration state, operator notes, and environmental constraints.
• Drive issues through intake, severity assessment, ownership, workaround or fix delivery, customer-safe updates, and closure.
• Convert recurring field issues and training gaps into support tickets, knowledge-base content, known-issue records, runbooks, and product feedback.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, robotics, aerospace, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in field engineering, forward-deployed engineering, applications engineering, systems integration, flight test, robotics support, unmanned systems operations, or a similar technical role.
• Strong background in software engineering, systems integration, or autonomy-adjacent systems, with proficiency writing, reading, and debugging modern C++ code.
• Working proficiency with Python, Bash, or similar scripting, plus troubleshooting experience across Linux or embedded systems, networking, configuration management, logs, telemetry, sensors, and operator workflows.
• Strong customer-facing communication, training, documentation, problem-solving, expectation-management, and escalation skills.
• Ability to comply with export-control, security, safety, sensitive-data, customer-site, and mission-specific operating requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomy, robotics, defense aviation, unmanned aircraft, flight testing, payload integration, sensors, or edge computing.
• Experience supporting defense, government, allied, or international customers in operational, test, training, or overseas environments.
• Experience building support, field-service, sustainment, or applications-engineering functions during an early product rollout.
• FAA Part 107, military aviation or maintenance, UAS operations, flight testing, systems engineering, or Field Service Representative experience.
• GenAI-assisted troubleshooting, documentation, knowledge capture, data review, or support workflow automation experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Customer-facing work across lab, flight-test, range, customer-site, and field environments.
• Collaboration with engineering, product, program, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, commercial, and support teams.
• Frequent domestic and international travel, customer-site work, test events, training events, and multi-week deployments.