Field Engineering Manager

Responsibilities

• Direct Team Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 3-5 Field Engineers — setting clear performance expectations, individual growth paths, and a team culture grounded in disciplined engineering practice
• Establish the operating cadences that make the team predictable: structured escalation paths, weekly standups, escalation reviews, and 1:1s that replace reactive firefighting with a defined, repeatable workflow
• Define and own the diagnostic procedures that Field Engineers follow when resolving product failures in the field — from initial triage through root cause confirmation to repair validation. Every technician who encounters a known failure mode should have a clear, tested procedure to follow
• Build and maintain a Repair Standards Library covering all SlipBot and SlipLift failure modes: step-by-step remediation procedures, required tooling, and expected outcomes. This library is the team's institutional memory — it must be current, not archival
• Convert individual expertise into documented, repeatable standards accessible to the entire organization. Knowledge that lives only in someone's head is a liability
• Own hiring and onboarding for future Field Engineers as the team scales with Slip's growing fleet
• Cross-Functional Partners
• Serve as the field's authoritative voice in cross-functional RCA sessions, design reviews, and product development discussions. Translate field observations into engineering-quality inputs without requiring Field Engineers to own the engineering work
• Partner with Service Engineering on RCA intake protocols, resolution validation, and feedback loops — ensuring fixes developed upstream are validated in the field and outcomes are reported back
• Translate monthly fleet health findings from Service Engineering into actionable field execution: updated repair standards, new diagnostic procedures, and targeted campaigns
• Persist with Applications Engineering to ensure fleet-wide technical standards flow into site-specific deployment configuration sheets at the time of new customer onboarding — reducing failures born from inconsistent commissioning
• Identify configuration or installation patterns that correlate with downstream failures and feed those findings back into Applications Engineering's pre-deployment checklists
• Maintain JIRA-based tracking for field-side RCA contributions — every open failure with a systemic signature should have a corresponding ticket, owner, and status visible to cross-functional partners
• Own Confluence space as the team's active knowledge platform — documentation must be current, organized, and genuinely used
• Fleet and Customers
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of field campaigns: identify the failure or risk (in partnership with Service Engineering), develop the field-side remedy and procedure, coordinate deployment logistics with the team and customers, and confirm resolution across the fleet
• Prioritize campaigns based on safety impact, customer operational risk, and fleet-wide exposure — not by loudest customer or highest ticket volume
• Build campaign playbooks executable by any qualified Field Engineer, with clear go/no-go criteria, rollback procedures, and post-campaign validation steps
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex or recurring product failures surfaced through Jira, ensuring resolution with documented, reproducible outcomes — not one-off fixes
• Establish and track field engineering KPIs: MTTR, first-time fix rate, escalation recurrence rate, and campaign closure rate. Use these to drive continuous improvement and report progress to Service Delivery leadership

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in field service engineering, service engineering, or technical support in a hardware or robotics-intensive environment — including direct hands-on diagnosis and repair of complex electro-mechanical systems
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing diagnostic procedures, repair standards, or technical troubleshooting frameworks used by a team in the field
• Solid understanding of electro-mechanical systems: motor drives, actuators, sensors, embedded controllers, and the interplay between hardware and software in autonomous platforms
• Experience contributing to root cause analysis (RCA) processes in collaboration with product or design engineering teams
• Proficiency with field service tooling: ticketing platforms (Zendesk or equivalent), documentation systems (Confluence), and engineering project tracking (JIRA)
• Familiarity with autonomous mobile robot (AMR) or industrial automation platforms is strongly preferred; ROS familiarity is a plus but not required
• Ability to read and interpret mechanical drawings, electrical schematics, and technical specifications
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related technical field required
• Leadership & Organizational
• 2+ years of direct people management experience — ideally leading a technical field team with geographically distributed responsibilities
• Proven track record of building structure in ambiguous environments: creating processes, documentation frameworks, and team norms where none previously existed
• Strong cross-functional influencer — able to operate credibly with Design, Mechanical, and Product Engineering teams and translate field observations into engineering-quality inputs
• Excellent written communication skills; able to produce clear, concise technical documentation — procedures, RCA summaries, campaign briefs — that technicians can follow without hand-holding
• Data-driven operator with the ability to identify trends in service data, prioritize by impact, and communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
• Comfortable operating at a fast-growing startup: you bring structure without requiring it, move with urgency, and recognize that building the playbook is part of the job