Hadrian
Sr. Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
$300K–$415K
San Francisco Bay Area, CA · On-site · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 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 the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
About the job
Leads Hadrian’s Forward Deployed Engineering team and technical delivery across major customer programs, shaping products and scaling the team.
What you'll do
- Own program technical roadmaps and end-to-end delivery, from scoping through production deployment.
- Serve as the primary technical owner for customer, government, and prime-partner stakeholders; lead technical reviews and decisions.
- Build and lead multidisciplinary teams, maintain hands-on technical involvement, and share program learnings to improve products.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated history leading engineering and product teams and scaling a product from 0 to 1.
- Executive-level customer relationship ownership and experience making company commitments and delivering on them.
- Hands-on technical leadership, including architecture, reviews, and taking ideas from design to delivery.
- AI-native approach; use AI to accelerate discovery and execution, with concrete examples of making yourself and teams run 5x faster.
Nice to have
- Founder or founding-team experience.
- Background 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 and execution; extend Opus, Hadrian’s AI-driven manufacturing autonomy platform. The posting says AI tools support recruiting but do not make hiring decisions.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative