Forward Deployed Engineering Director — AI-Driven Gov Programs

Hadrian Automation; Torrance (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision, and life

401k

Relocation support may be provided

Flexible vacation policy

Equity

Job summary

Hadrian seeks a Director to lead the Forward Deployed team on one or more programs, owning technical outcomes and delivering multi-billion-dollar-scale initiatives. You will work directly with the government, customers, and Hadrian’s leadership, shaping the technical roadmap and influencing platform strategy.

The role combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, hiring and guiding engineers, product managers, and designers while ensuring high execution standards across rate, quality,

Qualifications

• Highly commercial technical leaders with excellent product judgement.
• You have demonstrated history lead engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one.
• You are strong with external and internal executives. You have owned senior customer relationships and made commitments on behalf of a company that you then had to deliver on.
• You have product taste. You know what’s worth building and what good looks like for the user, and you’ve shipped end to end enough times to back that up.
• You are hands-on technical You are just as comfortable supporting your team with technical. You are just as comfortable supporting your team with architecture and review as you are taking your own idea from design to delivery.
• You are AI-native, and relentless about it. You use AI to compress everything from discovery to execution, you can show us concretely how it already makes you multiples faster, and you’ve rebuilt how your whole team works around it.
• You have hired builders into ambiguous roles and gotten them productive fast.
• You are driven by the mission and the tempo. Rebuilding the industrial base matters to you, and you want to deliver at the pace our customers need.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap and delivery. Take the program from the first ambiguous conversation to running in production, decide what Opus covers, what gets built, and what we say no to, and hold the team to a very high execution bar.
• Bring program learnings on platform teams. Share program learnings at Hadrian to improve the product for all customers and decide which Forward Deployed products should become part of Opus.
• Own the executive relationship on the technical side. Be the primary technical contact for customer program leadership, government stakeholders, and prime partners. Run technical reviews, have the hard conversations about scope and schedule yourself, and make the call when scope, schedule, and platform leverage pull against each other and the commercial stakes are real.
• Build and lead the team. Hire and grow the engineers, product managers, and designers on your program. You set the standard for how they work, and they bring you their hardest scoping calls.
• Stay hands-on. Early in a program that can mean building the v0 yourself. Later it means reviewing what your team ships closely enough to ensure it meets Hadrian’s quality bar.

Job description

Hadrian seeks a Director to lead the Forward Deployed team on one or more programs, owning technical outcomes and delivering multi-billion-dollar-scale initiatives. You will work directly with the government, customers, and Hadrian’s leadership, shaping the technical roadmap and influencing platform strategy.

The role combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, hiring and guiding engineers, product managers, and designers while ensuring high execution standards across rate, quality,