Engineering Lead - Forward Deployed Engineering

<h3><strong>About Viaduct</strong></h3> <p>Viaduct builds production-grade AI systems for the world's manufacturers: not pilots, not proofs of concept. Right now that means deploying real AI use cases inside one of Japan's largest manufacturers: a modern cloud and AI stack we control end-to-end, shipped all the way down to a plant floor running robots, lasers, and IoT gear most software teams never get near. Forward Deployed Engineering is where that stack meets the real world.</p> <p><strong>Who You Are</strong> <br>You're an experienced software developer who's shipped end-to-end, from ideation to production, and doesn't flinch at getting into the weeds of a customer's environment when it counts. You care deeply about engineering best practices and know how to collaborate closely with a senior architect and own significant implementation decisions yourself, rather than waiting to be handed a spec. You like mentoring engineers as much as writing code. You write code to create impact in the real world, not just creating endless prototypes or building other people's ideas.</p> <p><strong>About the Role</strong></p> <p>As Engineering Lead for our Forward Deployed team, you'll own the technical delivery of custom AI solutions for a major manufacturing customer, and help grow the team around you, working alongside a growing group of strong engineers, not sitting on an island. Day to day, you'll design, build, and ship solutions against real plant-floor constraints: legacy systems, strict uptime requirements, and hardware environments most of the industry has never touched.</p> <p>This isn't greenfield SaaS work. It's building modern software that has to survive contact with a real factory.</p> <p>Part of the job is knowing when not to build. We sit next to a sophisticated internal platform (K8s, Argo, Python/pydantic-ai, Go microservices, React/TS frontend) that's evolving into shared services. You'll be on the critical decision path for how we leverage that platform, while moving at speed to deliver high-impact use cases into production for our stakeholder.</p> <p><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design and implement customer solutions</li> <li>Develop, and lead a forward deployed software engineering team</li> <li>Ensure work is appropriately scoped, estimated, and planned</li> <li>Provide support for data center and network operations, first response for systems and network issues, and performance monitoring.</li> <li>Create and manage process improvement projects to continuously improve how the company builds and deploys its products</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Position Details:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Compensation:&