Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment

About the role

Shield AI is a defense-tech company that builds intelligent systems to protect service members and civilians, with products such as Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. The Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment is a highly technical, customer-facing role focused on deploying, supporting and sustaining Hivemind products in real operating environments. It bridges field deployment, customer operations, technical troubleshooting, training and sustainment, and is travel intensive (at least 50% of the time).

Key responsibilities

• Travel to customers globally to support installation, configuration, validation, training, troubleshooting and sustainment of Hivemind products.
• Become an expert user of the Hivemind Enterprise software stack, autonomy modules, deployment tooling and diagnostic workflows.
• Write and improve deployment runbooks covering install, validation, licensing, pre-mission checks, logs and acceptance steps.
• Provide hands-on technical support to customer operators, maintainers, partners and internal field teams.
• Capture field evidence (logs, telemetry, screenshots, version state, operator notes, mission phase, environment) and drive issues through intake, severity assessment, fix or workaround delivery and closure.
• Turn recurring issues, workarounds and training gaps into support tickets, knowledge-base content, known-issue records and product feedback.
• Partner with engineering, product, program, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, commercial and support teams, and support root-cause investigations.
• Support Field Service Representative-style obligations when required by contract.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years in field engineering, forward-deployed engineering, applications engineering, systems integration, flight test, robotics support, unmanned systems operations, technical operations or customer deployment.
• Strong technical background in software engineering, systems integration or autonomy-adjacent systems.
• Willingness and ability to travel at least 50% of the time, including multi-week deployments.
• Ability to comply with export-control, security, safety and customer-site requirements.

Required skills

• Writing, reading and debugging modern C++ code.
• Working proficiency with Python, Bash or similar scripting for diagnostics and automation.
• Troubleshooting Linux or embedded systems, networking, configuration management, logs, telemetry and release packages.
• Customer-facing communication, training, expectation management and escalation.

Preferred: autonomy, robotics or defense aviation experience; defense, government or international customer support; enterprise software deployment, licensing and provisioning; FAA Part 107, UAS or flight-test experience; active or eligible security clearance; use of GenAI tools for support work.