Engineering Manager

Mind Robotics • Normal, IL

7h • Onsite

About The Position

Mind Robotics is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, beginning on the factory floor. The company is seeking an onsite Engineering Manager to lead its forward deployed and software engineering team at a key customer site in Normal, Illinois. The role initially focuses on critical robot data-collection devices and later transitions to supporting robot deployment. The manager is the technical link between the customer and headquarters: serving as the senior technical voice onsite, translating field issues into product and roadmap priorities, managing escalations to HQ engineering, and deciding which issues are handled in the field versus addressed through product changes.

This is a hands-on management role overseeing a small team of Forward Deployed and Software Engineers. The manager is expected to combine team leadership and customer communication with direct technical involvement, including troubleshooting devices, networks, and deployments, coding and reviewing pull requests, and coordinating trials and testing of images, bug fixes, and feature development with offsite teams.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience managing engineers in field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform settings, including hiring, coaching, and supporting career growth.
• Deep hands-on troubleshooting experience with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware, with sufficient technical depth to review an engineer's diagnosis.
• Comfort with Linux system administration and Bash or Python, including the ability to read systemd units, provisioning scripts, and tcpdump captures.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, and firewall rules, and the judgment to distinguish company issues from customer-network issues.
• Customer-facing maturity and the ability to handle difficult conversations about outages or delayed dates while maintaining the relationship.
• Self-direction to run a site away from HQ and discipline to keep HQ informed proactively.

Nice To Haves

• Experience standing up or scaling a forward deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team.
• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role.
• Familiarity with fleet and infrastructure tooling such as Docker, Portainer, Ansible, Grafana/Prometheus, and remote device management.
• Background in robotics deployment, computer vision systems, IP cameras, or industrial IoT.
• Experience running incident response and postmortem practices across a distributed fleet.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the onsite team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Software Engineers, including hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, performance management, and coverage across the customer's operating hours.
• Own fleet reliability metrics, including uptime, data capture, and time to resolution, and run the dashboards and reviews used to track performance.
• Set onsite technical standards for provisioning, diagnostics, and networking through standard runbooks, repeatable device bring-up, and effective postmortems.
• Own the senior technical relationship with the customer by scoping requests, communicating incidents and timelines, and pushing back when requests are not a fit.
• Manage escalations to HQ engineering, determine which issues are handled in the field and which require product fixes, and represent field needs in roadmap and prioritization discussions.
• Remain hands-on with device, network, and deployment problems that exceed the team's capacity.
• Code and work with the team to build and review pull requests.
• Lead trials and testing of images, bug fixes, and feature-development work with offsite teams to deliver changes faster.

What This Job Offers

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