Tech Lead Manager

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Lead and grow the onsite team of Forward Deployed Engineers and SW engineers — hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, performance, and coverage across the customer's operating hours.
• Own fleet reliability as a number: define the uptime, data-capture, and time-to-resolution targets the team is measured against, and run the dashboards and reviews that keep them honest.
• Set the technical bar onsite for provisioning, diagnostics, and networking — standard runbooks, repeatable device bring-up, and postmortems that actually close.
• Own the senior technical relationship with the customer: scope new requests, communicate incidents and timelines, and push back when a request doesn't fit.
• Run the escalation path into HQ engineering — triage what the field absorbs versus what becomes a product fix, and represent the field in roadmap and prioritization.
• Stay hands-on. When a device, network, or deployment problem outruns the team, you're in it with them. You are comfortable with coding and work with your team to build and review PRs.
• Lead trialing and testing of images, bug fixes and feature development work with offsite teams to bring in changes faster

Job requirements

• 3+ years managing engineers — field, hardware, infrastructure, or platform — including hiring, coaching, and growth
• Deep hands-on troubleshooting background with embedded devices, single-board computers, cameras, or similar hardware; enough depth to review an engineer's diagnosis rather than take it on faith.
• Comfort with Linux system administration and Bash or Python: you can still read a systemd unit, a provisioning script, or a tcpdump capture yourself.
• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, firewall rules) and the judgment to tell our problem from the customer's network.
• Customer-facing maturity: you can own a hard conversation about an outage or a slipped date without spending the relationship.
• The self-direction to run a site away from HQ, and the discipline to keep HQ informed before they have to ask.
• Experience standing up or scaling a forward deployed, field service, or solutions engineering team (nice to have).
• Prior time as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar onsite role — you've done the job you're now managing (nice to have).