Hadrian
Director of Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering
$300K–$415K
Los Angeles, CA · On-site · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 9, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- Must be a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations to meet ITAR requirements.
About the job
Leads Forward Deployed Engineering teams delivering technical outcomes for major customer programs, adapting Hadrian’s products to customer needs and feeding lessons back into the platform.
What you'll do
- Own program technical roadmaps and delivery, balancing product scope, schedule, quality, and cost.
- Lead technical relationships with customer executives, government stakeholders, and prime partners.
- Hire and lead multidisciplinary teams, stay hands-on, and share program learnings with platform teams.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated experience leading engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one.
- Experience owning senior customer relationships and making commitments the company must deliver.
- Hands-on technical ability across architecture, review, and end-to-end product delivery.
- Ability to hire and rapidly onboard builders for ambiguous roles; use AI extensively to accelerate individual and team work.
Nice to have
- Founder or founding-team experience, particularly involving customer relationships and business decisions.
- Experience in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, hardware/software/operations, or forward-deployed or solutions leadership at a product company.
Pay
$300K – $415K USD base salary
Tools
Opus
AI focus
Use AI to accelerate discovery through execution and reshape team workflows; the role also extends Hadrian’s AI-driven manufacturing autonomy platform, Opus.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative