Forward Deployed Engineer
US$156,000 – US$320,000 / yr base salary
Posted 4 Aug 2026
Advertised as “Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment - open level (R5497)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$156,000 – US$320,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyAerospace, Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics (or related)
Study levelBachelor's
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
Shield AI builds intelligent systems that protect service members and civilians. Our products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and our teams support customers and operations across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
The Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment is a highly technical, customer-facing role focused on deploying, supporting, and sustaining Hivemind products in real operating environments. This role bridges field deployment, customer operations, technical troubleshooting, training, and sustainment.
This is a travel-intensive role. Candidates must be willing and able to travel at least 50% of the time, including frequent domestic and international trips, customer-site work, test events, training events, and multi-week deployments as program needs require.
In this role, you will work directly with customers and internal teams to install, configure, validate, train, troubleshoot, and support Hivemind products. The role requires strong technical judgment, clear customer communication, comfort operating under field pressure, and the discipline to turn field lessons into durable support artifacts: runbooks, supported baselines, evidence packages, known-issue records, escalation paths, customer-safe updates, and product feedback.
What you'll do:
- Deploy with customers on site globally, with an expectation of up to 50% travel, to support installation, configuration, validation, training, troubleshooting, and sustainment of Hivemind products.
- Become an expert user of the Hivemind Enterprise software stack, autonomy modules, deployment tooling, supported configurations, and diagnostic workflows.
- Execute and improve deployment runbooks covering software install, version/configuration validation, licensing or provisioning status, pre-mission checks, log readiness, and acceptance steps.