Founding Chief Engineer

Intessera; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Intessera is seeking a forward‑deployed engineer and delivery lead to own customer deployments and the program around them. You will stand up environments, capture expertise, wire data connectors, and run the cadence, readouts, and executive presentations that shape the engagement.

You will work directly with founders and executives, build with enterprise LLMs, ensure grounding, and deliver outcomes on schedule.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer engagements delivering end‑to‑end deployments of the Intessera engine.
• Stand up customer environments on‑prem or GovCloud and ensure data governance.
• Coordinate knowledge capture, expert involvement, and training for customers.
• Manage program cadence, readouts, and executive briefings with sponsors.

Job description

Forward‑Deployed Engineer and Delivery Lead

You are Intessera in the customer’s plant, holding the build and the program around it.

The opportunity

The Intessera engine is proven in production in another regulated industry, and the first aerospace and defense engagements are under way. This seat carries an engagement end to end. You stand up the customer’s environment inside their boundary, build the knowledge base their people recognize as their own, capture the experts whose judgment the teammate carries, wire the connectors into the systems where their data lives, and answer the hard technical question in the room. You also run the program around all of it: the sequence, the dependencies, the working sessions, the readouts, and the executive presentations that have a fixed date on a customer’s calendar.

You work directly with Andrew Kucheriavy, Intessera’s co‑founder and Chief AI Officer, and the inventor of the engine underneath it. A direct line, real ownership from your first week, and decisions that ship the same day you make them. On the customer side, Ivan Madera, our CEO, carries the executive relationships, and everything between the signature and the delivered outcome is yours.

This seat grows a team around it. As concurrent engagements grow, a forward‑deployed engineer takes the build and a delivery lead takes the program. You choose which half you keep, you shape the other role, and you help hire into it. The seat is defined for someone who has already carried a customer relationship and a technical build at the same time.

Program time is protected here. Cadence, tracking, and readouts have reserved capacity that engineering bursts do not consume.

What you will build and own

• Customer environment stand‑up: on‑premises or GovCloud provisioning, configuration, and the first working setup alongside the customer’s team.
• Knowledge base and reference‑case build: turning the customer’s records, drawings, dispositions, and expert knowledge into something the engine can reason over and their own experts recognize as accurate.
• Captured‑expert teammates for the engagements you carry, starting with the quality engineer, so the teammate reasons the way the person it represents does.
• Connectors into the customer’s quality, planning, and manufacturing systems, working with the engineer who owns the pipelines behind them.
• The technical room: rehearsals, working sessions, demonstrations, and the questions a demanding technical evaluator asks when the decision is being made.
• Program cadence across concurrent engagements: sequencing, dependency tracking, deliverable tracking, and the weekly rhythm that keeps a program honest.
• The path from a signed statement of work to a delivered outcome, including the moment when scope, dates, or expectations need renegotiating with the sponsor.
• Customer working sessions, enablement sessions, and readouts, including the ones with a fixed date and a senior audience.
• The early warning. You are the person who flags a date early, while there is still time to act on it.
• Directing agents across the build and the program, and verifying their output before it reaches a customer.

What you bring

• You have delivered technical work inside a customer’s organization as the responsible engineer: their environment, their data, their constraints, and their timeline.
• You have run enterprise delivery as the person accountable for the dates, and you have given a sponsor an early read on a date and kept their trust.
• You are effective in sustained direct customer contact: holding a technical room, facilitating a working session, and handling the room when the news is complicated.
• You build with large language models in production and you understand where the model needs grounding, where it needs a human, and how to prove the output is right.
• You do real integration work: reading someone else’s schema, negotiating access, and moving data out of systems that were not designed to give it up.
• You build your own tracking instruments.
• You direct agents to do both engineering and program work and you verify their output. Show us the artifacts: shipped work, session transcripts, the structure you built for yourself.
• You work written‑first and asynchronously, and you carry your own judgment in front of a customer and stand behind it.
• You can hold a build and a program at the same time, and you can tell us how you protect the program time when the build gets loud.

Nice to have

• Advanced manufacturing, aerospace and defense, or another regulated production environment where quality records matter.
• Quality and manufacturing systems: quality management, product lifecycle, and manufacturing execution systems, and the craft of getting data across them.
• Work with defense‑industrial primes, suppliers, or public‑sector logistics organizations.
• Nonconformance, root‑cause, and disposition work, from either side of the table.
• Consulting or professional‑services delivery leadership, where the statement of work is the contract.
• Voice interfaces, retrieval systems, or knowledge‑graph work.
• Time inside a forward‑deployed or field‑engineering function where the role carried real technical ownership.

How we work

Everything of consequence is written down here, so decisions, results, and the reasoning behind them live in files a colleague or an agent can read months later. The company’s knowledge is institutional, and everyone who joins inherits all of it on their first day.

We are a senior, agent‑native team, and the company scales with the people who steer the work. Every person here directs a fleet of agents and verifies what comes back, which is how each of us carries enterprise work at a depth that used to take a whole team. Adding an engagement adds agents alongside the person who directs them. That leverage is the operating advantage of working here, and it is why every person here owns a whole domain.

Work runs asynchronously across time zones. You take an outcome, gather what you need, and come back with the work done and the evidence behind it. This way of working is settled here, and we hire people who arrive fluent in it, with work they can show us.

We hire people who teach us something. In your first month, show us a practice or a way of reasoning that makes us better, and we make room for it.

Who we are

Intessera is the institutional judgment layer for aerospace and defense manufacturing. We close the loop between what a part was quoted, designed, planned, built, inspected, and corrected as: the drift that no system reconciles, and the source of the recurring nonconformances, scrap, rework, and change notices every manufacturer pays for. We capture the reasoning behind high‑stakes manufacturing decisions, validate it against real outcomes, and redeploy it before the same nonconformance recurs.

The accumulated manufacturing and quality judgment of a plant becomes an active teammate that coaches at design and review, offers the precedent on a deviation, and checks work before it ships, so expertise that used to walk out the door stays in the building. Your systems stay authoritative. What Intessera holds is the judgment record: held for you only, never pooled, never training anyone else.

The engine underneath is deployed and proven at its core in another regulated industry, and the company holds a filed, active patent portfolio. Intessera was founded by Andrew Kucheriavy, Chief AI Officer, and Ivan Madera, CEO.

How we hire

1. Application. We read for evidence that you already work with agents, for customer‑facing technical delivery you carried, and for programs you kept on their dates.

2. Asynchronous work sample. A timeboxed task on a kit we provide, built from public data, with both sides of the seat in it: something to build and a delivery situation with real conflicts. You send back the working artifact and the plan, the full transcript of your session with your agents, and a short account of what you verified and what you assumed.

3. Live pairing, ninety minutes. We work a real problem together, with agents.

4. Customer session. A working session with a demanding quality or engineering stakeholder at a manufacturer, with a hard technical question and a date in play, run the way a real customer session runs.

5. Working‑style assessment. The same assessment the current team has taken. It comes after the work sample, it informs a conversation about how you like to work, and it never eliminates a candidate.

6. Teach us something, thirty minutes. You pick the subject. We want to be taught.

7. References, focused on how you operate with customers and under real conditions.

The work sample runs on public data in a kit built for the purpose. No candidate touches a production repository, a customer environment, or customer data at any stage.