Forward Deployed Engineer

Conduit builds autonomous factories through a single data abstraction layer across every machine, robot, sensor and software a factory might have, agnostic of brand or backend. We partner with manufacturers to turn their existing infrastructure into AI without rip and replace, and are able to light up an entire factory in a matter of days, not months, with as few as 2 FDEs at a time. We are live with manufacturers across the country and are growing quickly. We are hiring the people who put Conduit on the floor and establish our platform as foreverware.

The Role

This is a customer-first FDE role. You will work directly with stakeholders, learn what their needs are, and translate them into deployable results. We are looking for someone who can sit in a manufacturing CEO's office and say “let's solve this right now,” walk down to the line, work with the operators and controls team, and communicate your findings to our engineering team back in SF.

You will be technical. Your unfair advantage is that you are effective with people: you read the room, you sequence the work, you keep the deployment moving even when twelve things are going wrong at once. Our early targets are mid-market manufacturers, where the CEO picks up the phone and a small team can change the trajectory of the plant.

What you'll do

• Own deployments end to end. From the first site visit through scoping, integration, commissioning, go-live, and the first month of ramp.
• Lead integration work with our robotics partners, the customer's existing automation, PLCs, MES/ERP, and the rest of the factory floor stack.
• Be the technical face of Conduit at the customer.
• Translate customer reality into clean briefs for our home base engineering team. Turn “the line keeps stalling at 2pm” into a real problem statement with the right data attached. Your direction will become a scalable product feature benefitting all of our customers.
• Travel frequently. Some weeks will be entirely onsite. We support manufacturers across the country — the factory is where the work is.

Who You Are

• 3+ years post-undergrad, or 1+ year post-MBA, of demanding, high-output work. Top management consulting, investment banking, strategy or operations at a top startup, or comparable.
• You crave problems to solve and battles to win, and have a track record of stomping mediocrity
• You have a real technical track record. We want to see a deployment you owned, something you built, or a product with your name on it.
• You are great with people. CEO, plant manager, controls tech, software engineer — you can speak each of their languages without being condescending or out of your depth.
• You are not threatened by hardware. You will be in a hard hat in a factory in week one.
• You are operationally relentless. You do not lose threads. You unblock things by Friday that other people leave for Monday.
• You want to be a part of the reindustrialization of the United States.

Bonus Points

• Engineering, CS, or industrial engineering background.
• Past stint at a hardware, robotics, AV, or industrial-tech company.
• Built and shipped a real software project (a side project, a startup, a meaningful internal tool).
• Manufacturing exposure. Even one summer in a plant counts.
• You've been the best at something and have been chasing that high ever since

Why Conduit?

If you came out of consulting wanting to do the real thing instead of the slide about the real thing, this is the role. You will be in factories, with operators and CEOs, deploying systems that move physical objects in the world and will ultimately transform our country.

• Top tier pay and equity: We want to make it easy to join Conduit.
• Generational opportunity. Be early at a company defining the software layer for industrial automation.
• American re-industrialization is happening. We’re building the platform to make it real — faster.
• Zero bureaucracy. High impact. You’ll be on the front lines, solving real problems for real factories.
• You will level up. You’ll work directly with the founder and exec team — and grow into a senior operator.

Conduit is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates.

To apply, email [email protected] with your resume and a note on why you think you might make a strong fit.