Forward Deployed Engineer

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. The Role Forward Deployed Engineers embed on enterprise customer programs and do whatever it takes to make them succeed. Sometimes that means providing connective tissue: configuring and integrating Opus, Hadrian's software and robotics platform, for the specific needs of a program. Just as often it means building new products at the edge, including ones the customer didn't know to ask for. You'll drive the full loop from discovery to deployment, with no layers between you and the customer. The best of what you build won't stay bespoke. The products you create at the edge often become part of Opus, which makes this one of the sharpest sources of new product discovery at Hadrian. This is not a customer success or deployment-support role — you'll spend most of your time building. The team is early and the people who join now will define what it becomes. What You’ll Do - Work a program end to end — from the first ambiguous conversation through discovery, build, deployment, and iteration. You stay on it from the messy start to running in production. - Communicate across the full stakeholder range — customer leadership, program managers, and the operators and engineers on both their team and Hadrian's — translating technical constraints into decisions non-technical stakeholders can act on. - Partner with the teams building Opus to go deep where a program needs it — architecting the integrations, data models, and configuration that let the platform run against a customer's real systems and production reality. - Build net-new software to make programs succeed — standalone applications, custom workflows, and integrations that solve problems Opus doesn't yet cover. Some stays bespoke to one program; some becomes part of the platform. - Ship fast and iterate. Get something working into users' hands early rather than perfecting in isolation. - Turn field learnings into platform direction. Feed concrete requirements back to the Opus teams and help decide when a one-off solution should graduate into the platform. What We’re Looking For - Strong builder with high ownership — comfortable going 0 to 1 and shipping in ambiguous environments where no one hands you the spec. - AI-native, and relentless about it. We're looking for ridiculously high-pace, high-agency engineers who use AI to compress everything — discovery, prototyping, execution. You can show us concretely how AI already makes you multiples faster, and you're hungry to push it further. - Comfortable across the whole stack — everything from UI/UX work to designing backend systems, reaching for whatever technology best fits the problem rather than defaulting to what you know. - Strong product instincts. You think about what to build, not just how to build it. - Experience working directly with customers or end users, translating ambiguous needs into concrete, sh…