Engineering Manager

Mind Robotics • Normal, IL

3d • 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 customer site in Normal, Illinois. The role initially focuses on critical robot data collection devices and will later transition to supporting robot deployments.

The manager owns the reliability of the fleet of data collection devices and the team responsible for keeping them operational. Acting as the connection between the customer and company headquarters, this person serves as the senior technical contact onsite and brings field issues to HQ to inform the product roadmap. The manager leads a small team of Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, manages escalations to HQ engineering, and decides whether issues should be addressed in the field or through product changes. The role combines hands-on technical troubleshooting with people management and customer engagement.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience managing engineers, including hiring, coaching, and supporting their growth; relevant teams may be in field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Strong hands-on troubleshooting experience with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware, sufficient to review and assess engineers' diagnoses.
• 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, with the judgment to distinguish company issues from customer-network issues.
• Customer-facing maturity and the ability to handle difficult conversations about outages or schedule delays while maintaining the relationship.
• Self-direction to run a site away from HQ and discipline to keep HQ informed proactively.
• Comfort with coding and collaborating with the team to build and review pull requests.

Nice To Haves

• Experience establishing or scaling a forward deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team.
• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role.
• Familiarity with fleet and infrastructure tools 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, hire, onboard, coach, and manage the performance of onsite Forward Deployed Engineers and Software Engineers, and coordinate coverage across the customer's operating hours.
• Own fleet reliability by defining and tracking uptime, data-capture, and time-to-resolution targets through dashboards and reviews.
• Set onsite technical standards for provisioning, diagnostics, and networking; establish runbooks and repeatable device bring-up processes, and ensure postmortems lead to follow-up action.
• Own the senior technical relationship with the customer by scoping requests, communicating incidents and timelines, and pushing back on unsuitable requests.
• Manage escalations to HQ engineering, determine which issues are handled in the field versus addressed as product fixes, and represent field needs in roadmap and prioritization discussions.
• Remain hands-on with device, network, and deployment troubleshooting, and work with the team to build and review pull requests.
• Lead trials and testing of images, bug fixes, and feature development with offsite teams to bring changes in faster.

What This Job Offers

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