Manager, Field Engineering & Operations

Third Wave Automation•Union City, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Third Wave Automation is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in. Third Wave Automation is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site-specific forklift navigation and infrastructure-free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand. We are seeking a technical leader to manage and scale our Field Engineering team. This team owns the full lifecycle of our robotic fleet at customer sites—from initial site assessment and deployment to ongoing fleet maintenance, L1/L2 customer support, and customer success initiatives. You will act as the critical bridge between our field operations and core engineering teams. A strong baseline in robotics (perception, localization, calibration) is required to effectively triage field issues, prioritize engineering bugs, and ensure our fleet operates safely and efficiently at scale.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in field engineering, technical operations, or deployment within the robotics, autonomous vehicle, or industrial automation space.
2+ years of direct people management experience, with a track record of hiring and scaling technical teams.
Strong fluency in robotics systems and terminology (e.g., localization, perception, calibration, kinematics). You do not need to write the code, but you must be able to read system logs, understand the architecture, and hold technical ground with senior engineers.
Experience managing L1/L2 customer support structures and on-call rotations.
Demonstrated ability to manage cross-functional projects spanning deployment, customer success, and ongoing fleet operations.
Willingness to travel to customer sites for critical deployments, mapping surveys, or high-level customer escalations.

Responsibilities

Recruit, manage, and mentor a team of high-performing Field Engineers.
Own the capacity planning and on-call scheduling for L1/L2 support.
Oversee initial site assessments (mapping and surveys), pre-deployment prep, hardware/software deployment, and customer operator certification training.
Manage fleet maintenance schedules, execute operational Proof of Concepts (PoCs), and track key performance metrics.
Drive customer success initiatives focused on increasing daily utilization and adoption of the deployed fleet.
Partner directly with software and hardware engineering to review field data.
Use your technical understanding of robotics (localization, perception, autonomy) to accurately qualify bugs, assess severity, and prioritize engineering support requests.
Be the point of contact for our customers for day to day operations and production issues and communications.
Manage Field Performance Testing (FPT) for new hardware and software releases, ensuring system stability before full-scale rollouts.