Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. 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.
Responsibilities
- Deploy with customers on site globally, with a minimum expectation of 50% travel, 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, supported configurations, and diagnostic workflows
- Execute and improve deployment runbooks covering software install, version/configuration validation, licensing or provisioning status, pre-mission checks, log readiness, and acceptance steps
- Provide hands-on technical support to customer operators, maintainers, partners, and internal field teams during deployment, test, training, demonstration, and sustainment windows
- Capture and organize field evidence for triage, including logs, telemetry, recorded data, screenshots, version/configuration state, asset context, operator notes, mission phase, and environmental constraints
- Drive issues through the support flow: intake, severity assessment, ownership, workaround or fix delivery, customer-safe status, closure, and learning loop
- Convert recurring field issues, workarounds, customer questions, and training gaps into support tickets, knowledge-base content, known-issue records, runbooks, and product feedback
- Partner with engineering, product, program, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, commercial, and support teams to route issues to the right owner for seamless customer support.Support root-cause investigation and corrective-action validation by reproducing issues, collecting field context, testing updates, and confirming fixes or workarounds
- Support Field Service Representative-style obligations when required by contract, including on-site support posture, issue intake, operator assistance, troubleshooting, documentation, escalation, and evidence capture
Skills
- 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, technical operations, customer deployment, or a similar hands-on technical role
- Strong technical background in software engineering, systems integration, or autonomy-adjacent systems
- Proficiency writing, reading, and debugging modern C++ code
- Working proficiency with Python, Bash, or similar scripting for diagnostics, automation, data handling, and field support workflows
- Strong troubleshooting skills across Linux or embedded systems, networking, configuration management, logs, telemetry, release packages, sensors or payloads, and operator workflows
- Excellent problem-solving, communication, training, expectation-management, and escalation skills in customer-facing environments
- Ability to write clear field notes, deployment records, troubleshooting guides, evidence packages, and support updates that engineering and support teams can act on
- Willingness and ability to travel at least 50% of the time, including frequent domestic and international travel and multi-week deployments
- Ability to operate professionally in lab, flight-test, range, customer-site, and field environments under time pressure
- Ability to comply with export-control, security, safety, sensitive-data, customer-site, and mission-specific operating requirements
- Experience with autonomy, robotics, defense aviation, unmanned aircraft, deployed defense systems, flight test, payload integration, sensors, operator systems, or edge compute environments
- Experience supporting defense, government, allied, or international customers in operational, test, training, or overseas environments
- Experience building or scaling a support, field-service, customer-success, sustainment, or applications-engineering function during an early product rollout
- Experience with enterprise software deployment, customer support, licensing, provisioning, release management, configuration baselines, or offline/air-gapped operating environments
- Hands-on experience with recorded-data analysis, diagnostic tooling, telemetry review, networking tools, system health checks, or support automation
- FAA Part 107, military aviation or maintenance background, UAS operator experience, flight-test experience, systems engineering experience, or prior Field Service Representative experience
- Experience using GenAI tools to accelerate troubleshooting, documentation, knowledge capture, data review, or support workflow automation
- Active or prior security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one when required by program or customer need
Company Overview