Forward Deployed Engineer

Instrumental, Inc.•Palo Alto, CA

74d•$155,000 - $169,000•Onsite

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be embedded on-site at customer factory sites — not visiting, not consulting remotely, but physically there for the stretches it takes to see a mission through. You'll use Instrumental Solve and the data it surfaces to investigate manufacturing issues, but the real work starts after the finding: knowing the specific product's architecture and build flow well enough to know what actually changed, and knowing the specific people on the floor well enough to get something done about it. Data tells you where to look; it's what you know about the product and the people that gets something fixed. Beyond the investigation work, this role gives you something harder to find: a line that's genuinely yours to run. You'll make the calls — what to fix first, how to work with the customer, what "done" looks like — without waiting on sign-off or a pre-built roadmap. You'll be the person the customer turns to and trusts, with real room to shape how things go.

Requirements

You have real, hands-on time on a factory or contract manufacturing floor — not adjacent to it, on it. You know how a build actually runs.
You can go deep enough on a specific product's architecture and build flow to recognize what changed and why — this matters more than general data fluency.
You know how to find the right owner for a finding — who can actually act on it, what they're measured on, and whether there's a real window to act. A well-supported finding sent to the wrong person still goes nowhere, and you know that going in.
You build real trust with the people on the floor and in engineering — not by reporting well, but by being present, credible, and useful over time.
You're comfortable being physically on-site, often for extended stretches. This is a majority-travel, factory-deployed role — not a headquarters seat.
You drive corrective action all the way to completion — you stay with a finding until it actually changes something measurable, not until it's handed off.
You thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without waiting for perfect instructions.

Nice To Haves

Mandarin fluency will be very beneficial for work on our customer’s manufacturing lines.

Responsibilities

Own a Mission and Deliver on It. You'll travel to customer factory sites, primarily in North America, with a specific, company-critical mission. Common missions may include setting up and integrating physical equipment and accelerating customer "time to value" by hand-tuning Instrumental algorithms and software. You'll have support from our global team, but you'll be the engineer on the ground who owns mission success
Build Relationships with Customer and Factory Stakeholders. While onsite, you'll build real rapport with the people who determine whether a finding turns into action — learning who owns what, they're accountable for, and how to work within that. You'll leverage those relationships to move quickly, and cement a strong, dependable reputation for yourself and Instrumental. During peak periods, travel ratio may be as high as 80% of the time – and may include transiting in evenings and on weekends.
Investigate and Drive Root Cause to Resolution. You'll dig into ambiguous manufacturing questions, using your knowledge of the product's build flow alongside production and test data to form hypotheses and land on validated findings. You won't stop at the finding — you'll drive the corrective action through until it actually changes yield, throughput, or time-to-market.
Shape How Instrumental Delivers Solve at Scale. You'll partner with Product and Engineering on what you're seeing in the field — product gaps, repeatable patterns, workflow fixes — helping build the playbooks that make the next mission faster than the last.