Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Hadrian Automation • Torrance, CA

3d • $300,000 - $415,000

About The Position

Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America. By combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we help aerospace and defense companies build rockets, satellites, aircraft, ships, and other mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost. Following our $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, Hadrian is rapidly expanding our manufacturing footprint, launching new capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, additive manufacturing, and more, while scaling our Factory-as-a-Service platform to transform how critical products are built. Backed by leading investors including JPMorgan Chase, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Morgan Stanley, we’re building the future of American manufacturing—and looking for exceptional people to help make it happen. If you’re ready to take on the most challenging and rewarding work of your career while helping create American manufacturing jobs for generations to come, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.

We embed Forward Deployed teams on Hadrian’s largest, most critical programs with the U.S. Government, the Armed Forces, and major defense primes. The Forward Deployed team works alongside the Program team from scoping to execution. Forward Deployed bends our product to fulfill customer needs. Sometimes that involves extending Opus, Hadrian’s AI-driven manufacturing autonomy platform, other times it involves taking a new product zero to one to make a program successful. Everything the Forward Deployed team learns working at the edge with our customers is fed back to our platform teams to improve Hadrian’s product for all customers. Recent projects have included standing up Factories-as-a-Service for the Armed Forces and multiple primes, extending Opus into new manufacturing domains such as energetics, and taking a product that was built for a single program into a $B+ product line.

Requirements

• Highly commercial technical leaders with excellent product judgement.
• Demonstrated history leading engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one.
• 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.
• 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.
• Hands-on technical. You are just as comfortable supporting your team with architecture and review as you are taking your own idea from design to delivery.
• 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.
• Hired builders into ambiguous roles and gotten them productive fast.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Founder or founding-team experience, especially if you ran customer relationships and business decisions while still building.
• Background in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, or anywhere hardware, software, and operations meet.
• Forward deployed or solutions leadership at a product company.

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. The program hits rate, quality, schedule, and cost in part because the software and systems behind it work; you own that part.
• 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.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans for employees
• 401k
• Relocation support may be provided for certain situations, based on business need.
• Flexible vacation policy
• Equity

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed