Forward Deployed Engineer (US/Defense)

About the role

We're building context/fab, a venture-backed industrial AI startup creating the agentic operating system for the future of manufacturing. Our vision is the self-aware factory: factories that understand their own equipment, processes, data, and operational context, where AI agents can reason across this context to solve real manufacturing problems. context/fab automatically connects fragmented industrial data and knowledge into a Context Graph, providing the foundation for agents across production, quality, maintenance, logistics, and engineering. We work directly with large industrial enterprises and leading SMEs, bringing this technology into real factories and operational workflows.

As our Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with customers from discovery through deployment and expansion. You'll understand how their factories operate, identify high-value problems, connect their systems and data to context/fab, and configure and deploy agents that deliver measurable operational impact.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand their factories, workflows, systems, and most valuable operational problems
• Lead technical discovery, workshops, and use-case definition together with customer operations, engineering, and IT teams
• Translate manufacturing problems into agents and custom capabilities for the customer and measurable success criteria
• Build, configure, and deploy agents and workflows for production, quality, maintenance, logistics, and engineering use cases
• Connect customer data across PLCs and industrial protocols such as OPC UA and MQTT, SCADA and historians, MES, ERP, QMS, CMMS, databases, APIs, and technical documentation
• Use our automated Context Graph capabilities to contextualize factory data and validate the resulting representation together with customer experts
• Work closely with customers during pilots and rollouts, troubleshoot issues, and continuously improve the solution
• Identify recurring customer needs and translate field learnings into clear requirements for our product and engineering teams
• Support technical sales and solution discovery for new customers

Requirements

• Strong technical foundation across software, data, or industrial systems
• Product-minded and excited about discovering and deeply understanding customer problems
• Comfortable working directly with engineers, plant teams, operations leaders, and enterprise IT
• Experience with Python, APIs, databases, or data integration
• Experience with manufacturing, industrial systems, AI agents, or enterprise software is a strong plus
• Entrepreneurial mindset with a strong bias for ownership, urgency, and building from zero to one in ambiguous environments
• Naturally driven to take end-to-end responsibility for customer outcomes and to operate with the autonomy of a founder inside a customer context
• Willing to travel regularly to customer sites
• Fluent in English; German or other European languages are a plus

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Strong communication skills and comfort operating independently in a fast-moving environment

This role is dedicated to deployments of context/fab in U.S. defense, aerospace, and ITAR-controlled manufacturing environments. It requires eligibility for a U.S. security clearance and the ability to meet ITAR and customer facility-access requirements. These requirements apply only to this role, not our general FDE openings.

Benefits

• Build the agentic operating system for the self-aware factory
• Work directly with large industrial enterprises and leading SMEs on real production problems
• Shape both our product and how it is deployed from an early stage
• Work directly with the founders and a highly technical team
• Help build deep-tech capabilities that keep manufacturing competitive in Europe
• Competitive salary and meaningful early equity
• Grow faster than almost anywhere else: experience a 10-year career in 2 years