Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding)

Aerovy•Seattle, WA

3d•$150,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Aerovy is the operating layer for hardware OEMs. We take the signals coming off equipment in mobility, industrial, material handling, and construction, and normalize them into one model for assets, components, health, and events that holds across brands and model years. With Aerovy, OEMs can launch an AI ecosystem for their hardware, elevate aftermarket service by improving first-time fix rates and reducing response times, and cut warranty costs and service spend through predictive failure detection and automated triage. Aerovy is a fast-paced startup founded in 2023 as a spinoff of research from Purdue University, experiencing significant growth in team size and ARR. The company is backed by institutional VCs and angel investors. As the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Aerovy, you will own the technical delivery of our platform into enterprise OEM customers. You will collaborate with customer engineering, IT, and service teams to integrate their machines, firmware, and business systems into the Aerovy cloud, ensuring successful outcomes. This role involves being the technical lead for each implementation, from scoping to go-live, including designing integrations, writing code for data transfer, and resolving customer-side system issues. A key aspect of this role is building repeatable core platform features and infrastructure from customer-specific work, which will then be used for future implementations. You will also be responsible for architecting and bootstrapping the processes and team for Aerovy's Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) organization. This position offers the opportunity to write production code, own customer outcomes, and build an organization from the ground up.

Requirements

At least 5 years experience contributing to a software engineering team, including customer-facing delivery, implementation, or solutions engineering.
BS/MS/PhD in CS, scientific, engineering field or equivalent experience.
Proficiency in Python or TypeScript, and in C# or Java.
Strong understanding of networking and IoT fundamentals (TCP/IP, MQTT, REST APIs).
Experience working directly with technical and non-technical customer stakeholders, and translating their requirements and constraints into engineering work.
Clear written and verbal communication, including technical documentation for an external audience.
Willingness to travel to customer sites.

Nice To Haves

Experience with embedded systems, IoT devices, telematics, or industrial hardware
Experience translating device data formats over common protocols (CAN, Modbus, MQTT, custom serial) into platform-ready formats
Experience working directly with enterprise customers, distilling their requirements, and implementing them
Solid experience in Cloud/IaaC Infrastructure and Tooling preferably AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFormation/CDK, etc.)
Solid experience in Docker/containerized applications
Solid experience with near real-time/real-time analytics, time series databases

Responsibilities

Own the technical delivery of each customer implementation end-to-end: discovery, integration design, build, validation, and go-live.
Convert customer-specific work into reusable platform components, tools, and documented integration patterns so each implementation is faster than the last.
Work directly with OEM engineering teams to onboard, validate, and integrate their hardware, firmware, and backend systems into the Aerovy cloud.
Design and implement integration and ingestion pipelines that bring customer-specific data onto the platform.
Run technical discovery with customer engineering teams, propose integration strategies, and unblock customer-side dependencies.
Partner with the Customer Success Manager on the implementation plan (kickoff, scoping, data and integration readiness, UAT, go-live) and own the engineering workstreams within it.
Support post-integration monitoring, debugging, and system validation across edge-to-cloud workflows.
Bring customer needs back to the platform team as clear engineering requirements.
Develop repeatable processes and infrastructure for Forward Deployed workflows.
Hire and lead junior forward deployed engineers as the FDE organization grows.