Forward Deployed Manufacturing Engineer

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be embedded on-site at customer factory sites—not visiting or consulting remotely, but physically present for the stretches it takes to see a mission through. You'll use Instrumental Solve and the data it surfaces to investigate manufacturing issues, but the real work starts after the finding: knowing the specific product's architecture and build flow well enough to recognize what actually changed, and knowing the specific people on the floor well enough to drive action. Data tells you where to look; it's your product and people knowledge that gets something fixed.

This role gives you a line that's genuinely yours to run. You'll make the calls—what to fix first, how to work with the customer, what "done" looks like—without waiting on sign-off or a pre-built roadmap. You'll be the person the customer turns to and trusts, with real room to shape outcomes.

About Instrumental

Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.

Requirements

• Real, hands-on experience on a factory or contract manufacturing floor—not adjacent to it, but on it. You know how a build actually runs.
• Ability to go deep on a specific product's architecture and build flow to recognize what changed and why—this matters more than general data fluency.
• Skill in identifying the right owner for a finding—who can actually act on it, what they're measured on, and whether there's a real window to act. A well-supported finding sent to the wrong person still goes nowhere.
• Ability to build real trust with people on the floor and in engineering—not by reporting well, but by being present, credible, and useful over time.
• Comfort with being physically on-site, often for extended stretches. This is a majority-travel, factory-deployed role—not a headquarters seat.
• Drive corrective action all the way to completion—you stay with a finding until it actually changes something measurable, not until it's handed off.
• Thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without waiting for perfect instructions.

Responsibilities

• Own a Mission and Deliver on It. Travel to customer factory sites, primarily in North America, with a specific, company-critical mission. Common missions may include setting up and integrating physical equipment and accelerating customer "time to value" by hand-tuning Instrumental algorithms and software. You'll have support from our global team, but you'll be the engineer on the ground who owns mission success.
• Build Relationships with Customer and Factory Stakeholders. While onsite, build real rapport with the people who determine whether a finding turns into action—learning who owns what, what they're accountable for, and how to work within that. Leverage those relationships to move quickly and cement a strong, dependable reputation for yourself and Instrumental. During peak periods, travel may be as high as 80% of the time and may include transiting in evenings and on weekends.
• Investigate and Drive Root Cause to Resolution. Dig into ambiguous manufacturing questions, using your knowledge of the product's build flow alongside production and test data to form hypotheses and land on validated findings. You won't stop at the finding—you'll drive the corrective action through until it actually changes yield, throughput, or time-to-market.
• Shape How Instrumental Delivers Solve at Scale. Partner with Product and Engineering on what you're seeing in the field—product gaps, repeatable patterns, workflow fixes—helping build the playbooks that make the next mission faster than the last.

Mandarin fluency is highly beneficial for work on our customer’s manufacturing lines, though we are open to all candidates.

Pay

The representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area is $155,000–$169,000. This position is also eligible for performance-based cash bonuses and growth-stage equity participation.

Benefits

• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• Commuter plans
• Parental leave