Field Deployment Engineer – Autonomy & Sustainment

FDE Times; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits

Equity

Bonus

Job summary

Shield AI builds intelligent systems that protect service members and civilians. Our Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment focuses on deploying, supporting, and sustaining Hivemind products in real operating environments across the United States and international locations.

This highly technical, customer-facing role requires strong judgment, clear communication, and the discipline to translate field lessons into durable runbooks, evidence packages, and knowledge bases for

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related technical field.
• 5+ years in field engineering or similar hands-on role.
• Strong background in software engineering, systems integration, or autonomy-adjacent systems.
• Proficiency writing, reading, and debugging modern C++ code.
• Experience with Linux, embedded systems, and field troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Deploy with customers on site globally, up to 50% travel, for installation, configuration, validation, training, troubleshooting, and sustainment of Hivemind products.
• Become an expert user of Hivemind Enterprise software stack, autonomy modules, deployment tooling, configurations, and diagnostic workflows.
• Create and improve deployment runbooks covering install, validation, licensing, pre-mission checks, logs, and acceptance steps.
• Provide hands-on technical support to operators, maintainers, partners, and internal teams during deployment windows.
• Capture field evidence (logs, telemetry, screenshots, configuration state) for triage and knowledge base updates.
• Drive issues through intake, severity assessment, ownership, workaround/fix, and closure.
• Translate recurring field questions into tickets, knowledge-base content, runbooks, and product feedback.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, and support teams for seamless customer support; support root-cause investigations and validations.
• Support Field Service Representative obligations as needed by contract (on-site posture, issue intake, troubleshooting, documentation, escalation).
• Projects include deploying Hivemind software during customer events, building handoff packages, and creating durable support workflows.

Skills

C++ programming

Python scripting

Linux

Diagnostics

Field deployment

Customer communication

Travel readiness

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or related field

Tools

Deployment tooling

Job description

Shield AI builds intelligent systems that protect service members and civilians. Our Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment focuses on deploying, supporting, and sustaining Hivemind products in real operating environments across the United States and international locations.

This highly technical, customer-facing role requires strong judgment, clear communication, and the discipline to translate field lessons into durable runbooks, evidence packages, and knowledge bases for