Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding)

About Aerovy

Aerovy is the operating layer for hardware OEMs. We take the signals coming off equipment in mobility, industrial, material handling, and construction, and normalize them into one model for assets, components, health, and events that holds across brands and model years.

With Aerovy, OEMs:

- Launch an AI ecosystem for their hardware: branded apps a manufacturer puts in front of its own customers, from the app that comes with the machine to connected services and subscription tiers
- Elevate aftermarket service: the machine reports a fault, it's diagnosed, the right technician is dispatched with the right part, and the job is closed out and reported. First-time fix rates go up; time to acknowledgement and time to response come down
- Cut warranty cost and service spend: predictive failure detection, automated triage, and AI-driven root-cause across their install base

We're a fast-paced startup building the digital infrastructure for the next generation of intelligent hardware. Founded in 2023 as a spinoff of research from Purdue University, we've grown from 5 full-time workers at the end of 2025 to 13 today, with ARR up 4x+ over the same period. We're backed by institutional VCs from Mudita Venture Partners, M25, Quorum Capital Partners, Knoll Ventures, and Purdue Ventures, and angels from Google, Tesla, Intel, Siemens +more.

Job Summary

As the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Aerovy, you’ll own the technical delivery of our platform into enterprise OEM customers. You’ll sit with the customer’s engineering, IT, and service teams, integrate their machines, firmware, and business systems into the Aerovy cloud, and get them to a working, measured outcome.

You’ll be the technical lead on each implementation from scoping through go-live: designing the integration, writing the code that moves customer data onto the platform, and unblocking the customer’s side when their internal systems get in the way. This is not simply one-off solutions engineering; you will be working on building repeatable core platform features and infrastructure. What you build for one customer, you turn into reusable platform components for the next.

As you execute these responsibilities you will also architect and bootstrap the processes and team that will form the foundation of Aerovy’s FDE organization as a whole. If you want to write production code and own customer outcomes at the same time, and build an organization from the ground up, we’d love to talk.

Responsibilities

- Own the technical delivery of each customer implementation end-to-end: discovery, integration design, build, validation, and go-live.
- Convert customer-specific work into reusable platform components, tools, and documented integration patterns so each implementation is faster than the last.
- Work directly with OEM engineering teams to onboard, validate, and integrate their hardware, firmware, and backend systems into the Aerovy cloud.
- Design and implement integration and ingestion pipelines that bring customer-specific data onto the platform.
- Run technical discovery with customer engineering teams, propose integration strategies, and unblock customer-side dependencies.
- Partner with the Customer Success Manager on the implementation plan (kickoff, scoping, data and integration readiness, UAT, go-live) and own the engineering workstreams within it.
- Support post-integration monitoring, debugging, and system validation across edge-to-cloud workflows.
- Bring customer needs back to the platform team as clear engineering requirements.
- Develop repeatable processes and infrastructure for Forward Deployed workflows.
- Hire and lead junior forward deployed engineers as the FDE organization grows.

Job Requirements

- At least 5 years experience contributing to a software engineering team, including customer-facing delivery, implementation, or solutions engineering.
- BS/MS/PhD in CS, scientific, engineering field or equivalent experience.
- Proficiency in Python or TypeScript, and in C# or Java.
- Strong understanding of networking and IoT fundamentals (TCP/IP, MQTT, REST APIs).
- Experience working directly with technical and non-technical customer stakeholders, and translating their requirements and constraints into engineering work.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including technical documentation for an external audience.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites.

NICE TO HAVES

- Experience with embedded systems, IoT devices, telematics, or industrial hardware
- Experience translating device data formats over common protocols (CAN, Modbus, MQTT, custom serial) into platform-ready formats
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers, distilling their requirements, and implementing them
- Solid experience in Cloud/IaaC Infrastructure and Tooling preferably AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFormation/CDK, etc.)
- Solid experience in Docker/containerized applications
- Solid experience with near real-time/real-time analytics, time series databases

ADDITIONAL NOTES

- This is a hybrid role based in Seattle with regular travel to customer sites, offering flexibility while ensuring close collaboration with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
- Expect up to 50% time traveling to meet with and work with customers.

Compensation

Base Salary $160K – $200K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus