Engineering Manager

About the team and the role:

We're hiring an Onsite Engineering Manager to lead our forward deployed and software engineering team at a key customer in Normal, IL. You'll own two things at once: the health of our fleet of data collection devices, and the engineers who keep it running. This role will start with critical robot data collection devices and then transition into robot deployment support.

You are the seam between the customer and HQ. Onsite, you're the senior technical voice the customer trusts when something breaks. At HQ, you're the person who turns field pain into a roadmap. You'll manage a small team of Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, own the escalation path into HQ engineering, and decide what gets patched in the field versus fixed in the product.

This is a hands-on management role. The right person can sit beside an engineer reading logs in the morning and renegotiate a deployment timeline with a customer lead in the afternoon.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow the onsite team of Forward Deployed Engineers and SW engineers — hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, performance, and coverage across the customer's operating hours.
• Own fleet reliability as a number: define the uptime, data-capture, and time-to-resolution targets the team is measured against, and run the dashboards and reviews that keep them honest.
• Set the technical bar onsite for provisioning, diagnostics, and networking — standard runbooks, repeatable device bring-up, and postmortems that actually close.
• Own the senior technical relationship with the customer: scope new requests, communicate incidents and timelines, and push back when a request doesn't fit.
• Run the escalation path into HQ engineering — triage what the field absorbs versus what becomes a product fix, and represent the field in roadmap and prioritization.
• Stay hands-on. When a device, network, or deployment problem outruns the team, you're in it with them. You are comfortable with coding and work with your team to build and review PRs.
• Lead trialing and testing of images, bug fixes and feature development work with offsite teams to bring in changes faster

Requirements:

• 3+ years managing engineers — field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform — including hiring, coaching, and growth
• Deep hands-on troubleshooting background with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware; enough depth to review an engineer's diagnosis rather than take it on faith.
• Comfort with Linux system administration and Bash or Python: you can still read a systemd unit, a provisioning script, or a tcpdump capture yourself.
• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, firewall rules) and the judgment to tell our problem from the customer's network.
• Customer-facing maturity: you can own a hard conversation about an outage or a slipped date without spending the relationship.
• The self-direction to run a site away from HQ, and the discipline to keep HQ informed before they have to ask.
• Experience standing up or scaling a forward deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team (nice to have).
• Prior time as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role — you've done the job you're now managing (nice to have).
• Familiarity with fleet and infrastructure tooling: Docker, Portainer, Ansible, Grafana/Prometheus, remote device management (nice to have).
• Background in robotics deployment, computer vision systems, IP cameras, or industrial IoT (nice to have).
• Experience running incident response and postmortem practice across a distributed fleet (nice to have).