Sr. Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
- Compensation
- $300K–$415K / yr
- Location
- Los Angeles, CA
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Not specified
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Highly commercial technical leaders with excellent product judgment.
- You have a demonstrated history leading engineering and product teams and scaling a product from 0-1.
- Executive‑level stakeholder management. You have owned executive level customer relationships and made commitments on behalf of a company that you then had to deliver on.
- You have product taste. You know what’s worth building and what good looks like for the user, and you’ve shipped end-to-end enough times to back that up.
- Hands on technical leader. You are just as comfortable supporting your team with architecture and review as you are taking your own idea from design to delivery.
- AI-native and relentless about it. You use AI to compress everything from discovery to execution, you can show us concretely how it already makes you and your teams run 5x faster.
- Track record of building highly productive teams in ambiguous enviorments.
- You are driven by the mission and the tempo. Rebuilding the industrial base matters to you, and you want to deliver at the pace our customers need.
Full description
Hadrian - Manufacturing the Future
Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America. By combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we help aerospace and defense companies build rockets, satellites, aircraft, ships, and other mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost.
Following our $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, Hadrian is rapidly expanding our manufacturing footprint, launching new capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, additive manufacturing, and more, while scaling our Factory-as-a-Service platform to transform how critical products are built.
Backed by leading investors including JPMorgan Chase, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Morgan Stanley, we’re building the future of American manufacturing—and looking for exceptional people to help make it happen.
If you’re ready to take on the most challenging and rewarding work of your career while helping create American manufacturing jobs for generations to come, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.
Forward Deployed at Hadrian
We embed Forward Deployed teams on Hadrian’s largest and most critical programs with the U.S. Government, the Armed Forces, and major defense primes. The Forward Deployed org works alongside programs and engineering teams on everything from scoping to execution.
Forward Deployed adapts our product to fulfill customer needs. Sometimes that involves extending Opus, Hadrian’s AI-driven manufacturing autonomy platform; other times, it involves taking a new product from 0 to 1 to make a program successful. Everything the Forward Deployed team learns working on the front lines with our customers is fed back to our engineering teams to improve Hadrian’s product for all customers.
Recent projects have included establishing Factories-as-a-Service (FaaS) for the Armed Forces and several major primes, expanding Opus into new manufacturing sectors such as energetics, and growing a product line originally developed for a single program into a programs valued at over $1b.
The Role
As a Senior Director, you lead the Forward Deployed team across one or more programs and are responsible for their technical outcomes. You will oversee the technical aspects of a program larger than most startups ever experience, working directly with government representatives, customers, and Hadrian’s leadership teams.
The team is in its early stages, and the scope is rapidly expanding with Hadrian. You will play a key role in scaling the Forward Deployed team and leading multi-billion-dollar programs.
- Own the technical roadmap and delivery end‑to‑end. Drive programs from ambiguous first conversations to production deployment—defining scope, determining what gets built, and making clear, decisive calls on what we ship.