About the role
Hadrian - Manufacturing the Future Hadrian is building autonomous factories that help aerospace and defense companies manufacture rockets, satellites, jets, and ships up to 10x faster and up to 2x cheaper. By combining advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we are reinventing how America produces its most critical parts. We’re accelerating our mission with the launch of Factory 3 in Mesa, Arizona, a 290,000-square-foot facility creating 350 new jobs. We are expanding rapidly to support thousands of future hires, launching Hadrian Maritime to expand into naval production, and introducing a Factory-as-a-Service model that delivers complete systems instead of individual parts. Hadrian is backed by leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, our fast-growing team is united around reindustrializing American manufacturing for the 21st century and beyond.
The Role Forward Deployed Engineers embed on enterprise customer programs and do whatever it takes to make them succeed. Sometimes that means providing connective tissue: configuring and integrating Opus, Hadrian's software and robotics platform, for the specific needs of a program. Just as often it means building new products at the edge, including ones the customer didn't know to ask for. You'll drive the full loop from discovery to deployment, with no layers between you and the customer. The best of what you build won't stay bespoke. The products you create at the edge often become part of Opus, which makes this one of the sharpest sources of new product discovery at Hadrian. This is not a customer success or deployment-support role — you'll spend most of your time building.
The team is early and the people who join now will define what it becomes. What You’ll Do Work a program end to end — from the first ambiguous conversation through discovery, build, deployment, and iteration. You stay on it from the messy start to running in production. Communicate across the full stakeholder range — customer leadership, program managers, and the operators and engineers on both their team and Hadrian's — translating technical constraints into decisions non-technical stakeholders can act on. Partner with the teams building Opus to go deep where a program needs it — architecting the integrations, data models, and configuration that let the platform run against a customer's real systems and production reality. Build net-new software to make programs succeed — standalone applications, custom workflows, and integrations that solve problems Opus doesn't yet cover. Some stays bespoke to one program; some becomes part of the platform. Ship fast and iterate. Get something working into users' hands early rather than perfecting in isolation. Turn field learnings into platform direction. Feed concrete