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Director of Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering

Hadrian Automation· Engineering, Product, Design
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San Francisco Bay Area, CA$300k - $415kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Director role leading Hadrian’s Forward Deployed team on government/defense programs, owning technical outcomes, roadmap, and executive technical relationships, with hands-on leadership and scale responsibilities.

Responsibilities

  • Own the technical roadmap and delivery. Take the program from the first ambiguous conversation to running in production, decide what Opus covers, what gets built, and what we say no to, and hold the team to a very high execution bar.
  • Bring program learnings on platform teams. Share program learnings at Hadrian to improve the product for all customers and decide which Forward Deployed products should become part of Opus.
  • Own the executive relationship on the technical side. Be the primary technical contact for customer program leadership, government stakeholders, and prime partners. Run technical reviews, have the hard conversations about scope and schedule yourself, and make the call when scope, schedule, and platform leverage pull against each other and the commercial stakes are real.
  • Build and lead the team. Hire and grow the engineers, product managers, and designers on your program. You set the standard for how they work, and they bring you their hardest scoping calls.
  • Stay hands-on. Early in a program that can mean building the v0 yourself. Later it means reviewing what your team ships closely enough to ensure it meets Hadrian’s quality bar.

Qualifications

  • Highly commercial technical leaders with excellent product judgement.
  • Demonstrated history lead engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one.
  • Experience owning senior customer relationships and delivering commitments.
  • Product taste and end-to-end shipping experience.

Skills

Required:Technical leadershipExecutive stakeholder management

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans for employees
  • 401k
  • Relocation support may be provided for certain situations, based on business need.
  • Flexible vacation policy
  • Equity
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Hadrian Automation

Manufacturing the Future

Hadrian is building the planet's most efficient factories to accelerate a free, abundant, spacefaring future.

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