Deployed Engineer

Paladin Drones•Houston, TX

34d

About The Position

Paladin builds Drone-as-First-Responder systems that get eyes on emergencies in under 90 seconds. Our autonomous drones, LTE connectivity, and Watchtower platform help police, fire, and EMS make faster, safer decisions. You will lead Paladin's forward-deployed reliability function-assisting 24/7 customer support, hands-on hotfixes, and onsite remediation. You'll dive into code when needed, ship patches safely, build customer-facing tools and internal utilities, and assist in a small triage pod. You're equal parts incident commander, field engineer, and player-coach who turns real-world issues into stable, scalable solutions.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Electrical/Mechanical/Systems Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent experience)
2-4+ years in Technical Support/Platform/Firmware roles with direct on-call ownership; 1-2+ years leading small teams or rotations.
Strong debugging across hardware and software: backend services (Python/Go/Node), web clients, Linux, networking (LTE/VPN/DNS), edge devices, or embedded/Linux SBCs (e.g., Jetson), with basic hardware troubleshooting knowledge
Proven incident management in production environments; disciplined use of logs, metrics, traces, and safe rollout patterns (canary, feature flags, rollback).
Comfortable reading and modifying code(C++ /Shell / python), writing tests, and merging hotfixes to production under pressure.
Excellent internal and external customer communication-clear, calm, and accountability-first.
Ability to travel on short notice; valid driver's license; comfortable around rooftops/docks and light hands-on hardware work.
Able to lift 50lbs for short durations.
Current part 107 commercial drone pilots' licenses or the ability to obtain it.

Nice To Haves

Public safety, robotics, autonomy, or telecom experience.
Cloud ops (GCP/AWS), Terraform, container orchestration, CI/CD.
C++, Python, React/TypeScript familiarity
FAA/DFR familiarity; RF/interference troubleshooting; ADS-B/UTM exposure.
Background working with secure environments and audit-ready processes.
Prior experience with DJI systems

Responsibilities

Assist 24/7 Reliability: Participate in an on-call rotation covering critical incidents across software, firmware, networking/LTE, and on-site hardware setups (docks, sensors, EXT/compute, cabling).
Hands-on Engineering: Triage issues, reproduce defects, write/merge hotfixes, and upstream fixes to core services with tests, feature flags, and safe deploys.
Onsite Remediation: Travel to customer sites for high-severity issues, new site stabilizations, and complex integrations; coordinate with local stakeholders and vendors to facilitate customer needs.
Build Tools & Products: Create small services, scripts, and dashboards that solve recurring customer pain (telemetry, log scrapers, health checks, alerting, one-click diagnostics).
Run Incident Management: Establish SEV levels, lead bridges, drive comms (internal/external), deliver RCAs within SLA, and track corrective actions to closure.
Operational Excellence: Maintain runbooks, golden signals/SLOs, playbooks, and site commissioning checklists; push automation to eliminate manual toil.
Partner Cross-Functionally: Work tightly with Customer Success, Product, and Core Eng to prioritize fixes, capture field insights, and harden releases before wide rollouts.
Security & Compliance: Handle sensitive data responsibly, follow access controls, and ensure logs/RCAs meet public-safety expectations.
Readiness & Training: Level up CS and field partners with training, shadowing, and cert programs; ensure every site has a clear "break-glass" plan.

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