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About us

AIM builds autonomous heavy equipment that performs real work in the real world - moving earth with 30-ton machines operating in unpredictable environments across mining, construction, and large-scale infrastructure sites. Our customers depend on us not for demos but for daily operational performance, safety, uptime, and productivity.

Our Forward Deployed Engineers sit at the tip of the spear. You will be the first to activate, validate, break, fix, understand, and refine autonomous machines as they operate in complex, real-world scenarios. You bring the machine to life for customers, and you bring the truth of the field back into engineering.

We're growing fast, scaling globally, and building the operational backbone that will define the next century of construction.

About you

You are the kind of engineer who thrives where the real world meets real hardware and real customers. You're equally comfortable:

• Installing hardware on a machine in 110°F heat
• Debugging network packets or sensor data at 2am after a site failure
• Rewriting a workflow or writing a quick script to unblock an operator
• Training on-site personnel while simultaneously capturing requirements
• Analyzing logs, diagnosing failures, and feeding insights back to engineering
• Rolling up your sleeves to build, test, and validate fixes directly on machines

You think like a systems engineer, act like a full-stack SDE/T, test like a QAE, and communicate like a TPM. You love taking ambiguous problems and making them concrete, bridging field issues and engineering decisions, and bringing calm to chaotic operational situations.

You are relentless in understanding failure modes, field conditions, safety considerations, and customer workflows - because in autonomy, the field is the truth.

About us together

Forward Deploy Engineers are essential to AIM's success and our customers' trust. Together, we will:

• Deploy autonomy into production environments with safety and reliability
• Gather the high-fidelity insights that engineering cannot discover from afar
• Define and improve service procedures, installation workflows, and operational playbooks
• Validate system behavior across hardware, autonomy, controls, networking, and cloud components
• Close the loop between customers, product, engineering, and safety-critical requirements

We will face difficult technical and operational challenges. We will argue and iterate. We will converge on solutions that are superior to each of our initial views. We'll build systems that work not in theory, but under mud, dust, shock, vibration, and human variability.

What you will own

Customer Deployment & Machine Activation

• Lead on-site machine activation, installation, and configuration of AIM autonomy hardware + software.
• Execute end-to-end deployment workflows - from mechanical installation to calibration, tuning, validation, and safety acceptance testing.
• Train on-site personnel on safe operations, standard procedures, emergency stops, and system workflows.
• Own deep operational immersion - spending time on physical job sites to understand realities, not assumptions.

Field Diagnostics, Debugging & Operational Stability

• Diagnose system failures across compute, networking, sensors, hydraulics, perception, control models, GNSS, and cloud connectivity.
• Perform structured root-cause analysis based on logs, system traces, packet captures, machine telemetry, and hardware inspection.
• Develop or extend diagnostic tools, scripts, and test harnesses to triage issues faster.
• Identify failure patterns and propose mitigations upstream (software, firmware, safety logic, hardware design).

Systems Engineering & Requirements Discovery

• Translate field realities into actionable requirements for software, hardware, autonomy, and reliability engineering teams.
• Identify gaps in serviceability, environmental tolerance (shock, vibration, dust), safety behavior, and operator workflows.
• Validate ConOps, safety assumptions, and degraded-mode behavior against real site conditions.

Testing, Validation & Continuous Quality Feedback

• Design and execute on-site test plans (functional, performance, environmental, regression) for autonomy behaviors, safety systems, control responses, and telemetry reliability.
• Validate releases, patches, hardware revisions, and autonomy updates under real operational stress.
• Maintain clear bug reports, defect triage, downtime logs, and structured feedback cycles into engineering.
• Drive quality upstream - flagging architectural/testability gaps early and championing improvements.

Product Integration & Custom Engineering

• Write production-grade code when needed - scripts, integrations, custom workflows, or quick fixes to unblock deployments.
• Build customer workflow integrations (data APIs, cloud ingestion, operator UI tweaks, etc.).
• Partner with autonomy, software, and hardware teams to validate features in the field and influence product direction.

Operational Engineering & Documentation

• Create service documentation, deployment procedures, troubleshooting guides, and safety protocols.
• Work with OEMs and dealers to enable them to install, maintain, and support systems.
• Define and improve deployment playbooks that scale globally.

Customer Relationship & Trust Building

• Act as the bridge between customers and AIM engineering - clear, honest, technically grounded communication.
• Manage expectations around downtime, features, maintenance windows, and machine readiness.
• Build trust through competence, transparency, and ownership.

Travel

• Deep immersion on customer sites worldwide (US, Australia, Africa, Europe).
• ~40–70% travel depending on deployment cycles.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering (Mechanical, Electrical, Computer, Robotics, Systems) or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years experience in one or more: field engineering, systems engineering, SDE/SDE-T, robotics deployment, industrial automation, test/validation engineering.
• Hands-on experience debugging complex hardware/software systems under real-world constraints.
• Strong coding ability (Python, Bash, JavaScript, or equivalent) and comfort writing production-quality scripts or small features.
• Strong understanding of sensors, networking, Linux systems, compute modules, and embedded hardware fundamentals.
• Experience designing/executing test plans and reporting structured quality findings.
• Excellent communication skills - able to translate field issues into crisp engineering requirements.
• Ability to work autonomously under ambiguous, high-pressure conditions.
• Willingness to travel internationally and domestically, often on short notice.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying robotics, autonomous systems, heavy equipment, or industrial automation.
• Experience with safety-critical systems, emergency stops, lockout/tagout, or functional safety frameworks.
• Familiarity with hydraulics, GNSS systems, perception stacks, or motion control systems.
• Experience analyzing operational data and performance metrics.
• Experience building test automation, CI test harnesses, or validation pipelines.
• Experience developing service manuals, install guides, or field engineering playbooks.
• OEM or dealer network experience (e.g., Komatsu, Caterpillar, Volvo).
• Ability to influence product and engineering teams through data, clarity, and field insight.

How you'll stand out

• You bring systems thinking - connecting field issues to architectural insights.
• You can turn ambiguous field failures into structured, repeatable engineering test cases.
• You operate calmly under pressure and lead customers through complex issues.
• You write clean code, clean documentation, and clean bug reports.
• You thrive in the dirt, in the logs, and in the details.
• You bridge the gap between engineering vision and field reality.