Forward Deployed Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 15, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 21, 2026.
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own AI Agent strategy and implementation inside some of the largest manufacturing environments in the country. You'll work at the bleeding edge of AI and your work will directly drive the creation of physical products across the economy.
There is no other place in the world to do this job the way you'll do it here. At Nexus, a forward deployed engineer works across entire industries and verticals of manufacturing, from solar cell and energy infrastructure to CPG. You'll manage multiple clients, and within them multiple plants, sites, factories, and implementations, with billions of dollars' worth of product flowing through the areas you touch. You’ll see throughlines across product development, scalable optimizations, and entire industries that no one sitting inside a single plant/customer could. And you'll be able to take learnings from one deployment and apply them across every customer we serve.
About Nexus
Nexus is building the Self-Improving OS for manufacturing. Our platform seamlessly embeds Industrial Agents into decades-old equipment and proprietary industrial control systems to monitor production lines, trace every loss to its root cause, and autonomously act.
We're growing quickly, with customers ranging from Fortune 100 manufacturers to startups building cutting-edge supply chains in the United States. Our team is comprised of manufacturing and software experts from Tesla, Distyl, and Convoy, and we're backed by A*, a16z, BoxGroup, and more.
What you'll do
Own the customer, and the portfolio. Lead AI Agent strategy and implementation for large manufacturers, with limited supervision. From kickoff through expansion, you're the technical face of Nexus in the conference room and on the plant floor. You’ll own several relationships across multiple sites and implementations. Because you operate across industries, you'll spot the patterns a single-account engineer never sees. You'll turn an optimization proven in one plant into a playbook for ten, and connect what's happening on the factory floor to where the product needs to go.
Build agentic workflows that matter. Design and ship complex, large-scale agent workflows for use-cases like automated equipment root-cause analysis, production scheduling, and process optimization, work that directly moves the needle on revenue expansion and customer satisfaction, in environments running billions of dollars of product.
Move fast in slow places. Most Nexus deployments go live in under two weeks, in environments where enterprise software normally takes quarters. You'll meet each customer wherever they are on their data journey and get them to value fast.
Compound the platform. Every deployment makes Nexus better. You'll turn field learnings into reusable agents, connectors, and product feedback, so the next deployment is faster than the last, and so learnings from one industry compound into every other.
What you bring
Strong software engineering skills and real fluency with today's AI stack. You've built with LLMs, or you've gone deep enough on the tools and landscape to have strong opinions about what works.
The ability to handle ambiguity at portfolio scale - juggling multiple clients, sites, and implementations simultaneously, and synthesizing what you learn across them into insights that transfer between customers and industries.
Demonstrated excellence, through any combination of academic record, work experience, open-source contributions, or public writing.
Evidence of high agency and independent thinking - things you started, shipped, or wrote because nobody was going to do it for you.
You present well. You can own a customer relationship, run the room, and communicate hard technical ideas to plant managers and process engineers alike.
New grads welcome. This is an exceptional first role for someone who wants maximum ownership from day one.
Who you are
Excited about the promise of Physical AI and the people who keep the physical world running.
A pattern-seeker: energized by seeing how a fix in one vertical maps to a bottleneck in another, and by carrying those learnings across an entire book of customers.
Super driven - the kind of person who wants hands-on customer experience that could one day translate into your own startup or team.
At home in ambiguity: you'd rather figure out the right thing to build than be handed a spec.
A low-ego, high-integrity operator with an innate hunger to achieve goals in a startup environment.
Interview process
Application review: Send us your stuff, and a quick note on why you're excited.
Intro chat: Share what you're looking for next and learn more about what we're building.
Founder interview: Talk with our founder in more detail about the role.
Technical interview: We'll have you complete a short exercise specific to the role.
Onsite: Come to San Francisco and meet the team through a series of 1:1 interviews.
Decision: We'll move fast.
This role is based in San Francisco, with regular travel to customer sites.