---
title: 'Director, Forward Deployed Engineering at Viam'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-forward-deployed-engineering-viam-new-york-884vbts3xky2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Director, Forward Deployed Engineering at Viam

- **Company:** Viam
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/viamrobotics/jobs/6146938004

## Job description

## About Viam

Founded by Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and former CTO of MongoDB, Viam is a novel robotics engineering platform that lets you configure, control, and manage robots intuitively and quickly. We’re inspiring a generation of engineers to solve complicated automation problems with our uniquely powerful suite of software tools.

We’re a ~100-person company headquartered in New York City.

## About the Role

Hybrid 3 days/week in NYC office, with occasional travel to customer sites

We're looking for a Director of Forward Deployed Engineering to lead the team responsible for getting Viam's customers into production. You'll manage a team of five engineers working across our most strategic accounts, own the technical approach to each deployment, and serve as the senior technical partner to our customers' engineering and operations leaders.

This is a leadership role for someone who is still technical. You'll spend your time on architecture decisions, design reviews, coaching, and customer conversations. Prior professional robotics experience isn't required, but you should be comfortable around hardware and physical systems, and able to get fluent in a new platform quickly.

What you’ll own:

- Manage a team of five forward deployed engineers: coaching, performance, hiring, and how they are resourced across accounts.
- Own the technical approach across deployments and make the architecture and prioritization calls.
- Be the senior technical voice with customer leadership, from kickoff through escalation.
- Work with Viam leadership on account direction, and keep them current on progress, risks, and blockers.
- Drive deployments to production: hold the schedule, unblock what's stuck, and change approach when a site demands it.
- Turn field learnings into platform priorities with Product and Engineering.

What you bring:

- Experience managing engineers who deploy software in customer environments.
- Deep systems experience and the ability to get fluent in an unfamiliar platform quickly. You can review a design and read code, though you won't be coding day to day.
- Judgment across systems integration, SDKs, and edge/cloud architectures, including what breaks when networks and hardware are unreliable.
- A track record with enterprise customers, including the credibility to hold a hard conversation with their leadership.
- Comfort deciding with incomplete information and owning the outcome.
- Experience building structure where none existed, in an environment where most of the work is still bespoke.
- Willingness to balance one customer's urgency against what scales across the portfolio.

Experience with robotics or IoT is not required.

The salary for this role is between $225,000 - $275,000 /year. Full-time Benefits

Viam’s base salary range for this role is posted above. In addition to cash compensation, Viam offers a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants, health benefits, and more.

- 100% covered medical/dental/vision insurance plans, commuter benefits
- 25 days paid vacation and generous holiday observances
- Free lunch every day that you’re in the office
- One Medical Membership
- Citi Bike memberships
- Monthly wellness stipend to be used for a variety of fitness-related items like gym memberships, fitness classes, fitness equipment, and more
- Paid parental leave
- Reproductive Health Benefits, including Fertility Benefits and Abortion Access Travel Benefits
- Yearly Learning and Development Budget for your own personal learning goals

Values:

- Vision Driven
- Collaborate Openly
- Act Decisively
- Succeed Through Diversity
- Hold Ourselves Accountable
- Lead with Curiosity

To all recruitment agencies:

Viam does not accept unsolicited agency resumes or calls from recruitment agencies or search firms. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or Viam employees. Viam is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

## About Viam

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Viam provides a software platform for building, deploying, and managing robotics applications, enabling engineers to develop for the physical world using modern software practices.
- **Entity Type**: Private (venture‑backed; multiple funding rounds including Series B/C)
- **Headquarters**: New York City, New York, USA
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Eliot Horowitz (co‑founder and former CTO of MongoDB)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Robotics, manufacturing, marine, climate tech, logistics, entertainment, food & beverage
- **Target customers**: B2B – engineers, startups, and enterprises building and managing robotics fleets
- **Mission**: “Make the physical world programmable” – a single platform that abstracts hardware complexity so any engineer can build and scale robotics applications.

## Products & Services
- **Viam Platform**: A software platform combining multi‑language SDKs (Python, Go, TypeScript), cloud‑based fleet management, OTA updates, built‑in motion/vision services, and a Registry for drivers and ML models. Engineers write application logic from day one without assembling a traditional robotics stack. The same code scales from prototype to global fleet without rewrites.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total funding amount not disclosed; company has raised at least Series B/Series C per LinkedIn signals.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not specified in public sources; board includes venture investors.
- **Growth Signals**: Growing team across the U.S. and Europe, active hiring (7 open positions as of mid‑2025), dedicated robotics lab in NYC, and expanding into verticals like manufacturing, marine, and climate tech.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open architecture**: Hardware abstracted into simple, consistent APIs – engineers write in familiar languages without vendor lock‑in.
- **End‑to‑end lifecycle**: Single platform covering development, deployment, monitoring, and over‑the‑air updates, eliminating stack resets when scaling.
- **Multi‑language SDKs**: Python, Go, and TypeScript support lowers the barrier for software engineers entering robotics.
- **Proven founding team**: CEO Eliot Horowitz previously co‑founded MongoDB, demonstrating ability to build a widely adopted developer platform.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand the platform’s coverage across industries (manufacturing, logistics, climate, marine, entertainment).
- Continue simplifying the robotics development lifecycle so that “the physical world is finally programmable.”
- Grow the engineering organization, particularly in data platform and fleet management roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include Vision Driven, Lead With Curiosity, Collaborate Openly, Act Decisively, Succeed Through Diversity, and Hold Ourselves Accountable. Strong emphasis on learning, honest feedback, and building for diverse perspectives.
- **Work model**: Hybrid – three days per week in the NYC office (near Lincoln Center), two days remote. Teams also distributed across the U.S., U.K., and Italy.
- **Benefits**: Fully covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and children; free One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc; fertility benefits (egg freezing, IVF); 20 weeks paid parental leave; 401(k) with traditional/Roth options; generous vacation and sick leave; daily lunch, snacks, and coffee in office; fitness reimbursement; Citi Bike membership; shower room, bike storage, and mother’s room.
- **Growth**: Annual budget for courses, conferences, and professional memberships; tuition support for degrees; “Lead with Curiosity” professional development program; dedicated build days for engineers to hack on real robots.

## Sources
1. [viam.com/careers](https://www.viam.com/careers) – Benefits, culture, and work environment details
2. [viam.com/about](https://www.viam.com/about) – Founders, history, mission, and team overview
3. [viam.com](https://www.viam.com/) – Platform description and value proposition
4. [Greenhouse job board](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/viamrobotics) – Current open positions and company description
5. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/viaminc) – Funding signals (Series B/C), headcount, and recent activity

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