Forward Deployed Engineer

Needle; Berlin; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Needle Berlin is seeking an experienced field-oriented engineer who will bridge sales and deployment of our sensor and software platform for critical infrastructure. You will drive technical conversations on calls, design integrations with customer stacks, and guide deployments from site survey to a trusted, working solution.

You will also contribute to product learning from field deployments, define patterns for reuse, and help shape a future where enterprise customers buy hardware, software,

Qualifications

• Experience in customer-facing engineering at industrial or infrastructure sites.
• Ability to write integrations against REST APIs, MQTT, webhooks.
• Strong networking knowledge: VLANs, routing, firewalls, VPNs, NAT.
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Familiar with change-control processes and field deployments.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical voice in sales calls, clarifying feasible customisations and costs.
• Integrate customer stacks via APIs, MQTT, and similar interfaces.
• Assess site networks (VLANs, routing, firewalls, VPNs) and adapt deployments.
• Develop on the base platform alongside the engineering team.
• Identify opportunities to convert custom work into product features.
• Provide feedback from customers to improve engineering decisions.

Skills

Customer-facing engineering

REST APIs

MQTT

Webhooks

Networking

Sales engineering

Linux

Containers

Tools

NVIDIA Jetson

Job description

Location: Berlin, on-site + field | Type: Full time, permanent | Reports to: CTO | Range: €70,000–100,000 | Languages: German C1 + English | Travel: ~20%, DACH

Spine builds the sensor towers and the software that let operators of critical infrastructure see what is happening on their sites: substations, gas facilities, solar parks, logistics hubs. The hardware detects. The platform correlates and tells one person in a control room the one thing worth their attention.

This role sits where the product meets the customer. Before a contract, you are the technical voice on sales calls. After it, you take the deployment from site survey to a customer who trusts the alerts. In between, you are an engineer on the base platform, so what you learn in the field goes straight into the product.

The function does not exist yet. How deployments are run, what gets templated and where the line sits between customisation and product are things you decide with the founders in your first year.

What You'll Own

Technical voice in the sales process. You join sales calls to understand what the customer needs before anything is signed. You tell them honestly which customisations are possible, which are not, and what they would cost. You make sure we only sell what we can deliver, and you capture requirements in a form engineering can use.

Integration into the customer's stack. Their video management system, energy management system and monitoring centre, via APIs, MQTT and whatever else they run. You build these as patterns we reuse rather than one-offs per account.

Making things work in each customer's network. Every site has its own network: segmentation, firewalls, VPNs, uplinks, change-control. You work out how our towers and mesh fit into it and document the patterns that recur.

Engineering on the base platform. When you are not on a customer integration, you are working on the core platform alongside the engineering team. You fix what you found in the field and build what the next deployment needs.

Customisation as a product line. Enterprise customers buy hardware, software and customisation as one offering. A good part of the custom work is customer-financed development that should become product. You are the person who spots which is which.

The feedback loop into engineering. Product learns what is actually breaking on real sites, in the customer's words rather than translated through a sales call.

The playbook. By the time we run deployments in parallel, the second and third FDE should be able to work from what you wrote.

What We're Looking For

You have done customer-facing engineering at industrial or infrastructure sites: commissioning, integration or field engineering for a hardware or industrial software product.

You can write integrations against other software's interfaces: REST APIs, MQTT, webhooks, and similar. You write real code and a script is not a stretch.

You understand networking well enough to work out a customer's setup from a diagram and a short call: VLANs, routing, firewalls, VPNs, NAT, and what breaks when a device sits behind them.

You can talk to customers, technical and non-technical, and say "yes", "not like that" or "not without X" clearly and with reasons. You are comfortable being the technical voice on a sales call.

You are comfortable working inside someone's change-control process, with their safety rules, on their schedule.

You can debug a device in the field without escalating first.

German at C1 or better, and English. Most of the sites are in Germany and most of the engineering conversation is in English.

Fine with travelling to customer sites

Nice to Have

Energy, utilities, rail or industrial security experience, or time inside an operator rather than a vendor.

Video systems, ONVIF/RTSP, VMS integrations, or SCADA-adjacent work

Linux, containers and edge devices (e.g. NVIDIA Jetson).

Pre-sales or solutions engineering experience.