Hadrian
Sr. Director, 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 Hadrian’s Forward Deployed Engineering teams and technical delivery across major customer programs, from initial scoping through production, while scaling the team and feeding program learnings back into products.
What you'll do
- Own program technical roadmaps and end-to-end delivery, making scope, build, and release decisions.
- Lead technical relationships with customers, government stakeholders, and prime partners; oversee reviews, scope, scheduling, and technical decisions.
- Hire and develop cross-functional teams, set quality standards, 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 through delivery.
- Uses AI across discovery and execution and can demonstrate how it makes them and their teams run 5x faster.
Nice to have
- Founder or founding-team experience; experience owning customer relationships and business decisions.
- 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; the posting says candidates should demonstrate how AI makes them and their teams run 5x faster.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative