---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineering Lead at Orbital'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-lead-orbital-london-qc117e9csesh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineering Lead at Orbital

- **Company:** Orbital
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/orbitalindustries/47c0edc0-7f3f-4aac-85a8-fe32a3628ab4

## Job description

Orbital Industries is an AI Industrial company, with frontier AI embedded at every step in the production of critical physical products - from creating advanced materials to engineering and manufacturing. Every Orbital Industries product is developed using CurieOS, our AI operating system, uniting AI-automated hardware engineering with AI-designed material science to achieve breakthrough real-world performance. We also offer CurieOS to our customers and partners, extending the same platform and workflows that power Orbital Industries to their own teams and products. We have an ambitious mission and need excellent people in all our teams - AI research, operations, advanced materials, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and manufacturing. Working at Orbital Industries means working in vertically integrated teams across the full stack, from molecules to manufacturing. We're looking for people who have a love of physical technology, curiosity in AI and a desire to learn.

## Role Overview

Orbital's AI software platform, CurieOS, is used by scientists and engineers to design and build products serving critical industries. Powering this software are our world leading AI models in advanced materials, hardware engineering and simulation. As Forward Deployed Engineering Lead at Orbital you will build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering function, owning its technical standards, delivery model and team. You are an engineering leader who builds alongside customers, not a delivery leader who manages engineers. You will deliver complex deployments hands-on while hiring and developing the team that scales this capability across Orbital's growing customer base. First and foremost, we want to work with someone with a love of craftsmanship, continual learning and building systems that scale.

## Key Responsibilities

Deliver deployments hands-on, across the breadth of industrial R&D

- Drive customer adoption so CurieOS becomes how their scientists and engineers work day-to-day
- Deliver complex customer deployments hands-on, writing production code, designing architectures, building integrations and debugging issues across CurieOS and customer systems
- Own the technical quality of deployments from prototype through production, including reliability, maintainability and operational performance
- Design and build systems that connect heterogeneous software, data and physical infrastructure, from simulation campaigns and digital twins to lab instruments, test rigs and CAD/PLM systems
- Develop reusable integration patterns that allow CurieOS to operate reliably across complex customer environments

Own delivery end-to-end

- Embed with customer teams to understand ambiguous, high-value R&D problems, challenge assumptions and identify where CurieOS can deliver meaningful impact
- Translate those problems into a technical approach, milestones and acceptance criteria, making pragmatic architecture and scope trade-offs as you learn
- Own the engagement from initial technical discovery through implementation, production deployment and adoption
- Set KPIs per engagement (screening throughput, design-cycle reduction, experiments avoided), measure pre/post and report outcomes to executive sponsors

Build and lead the team

- Build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering function, owning its technical standards, engineering practices and delivery model
- Hire, develop and manage exceptional Forward Deployed Engineers across diverse scientific and engineering domains
- Set the technical bar through code and architecture review, and act as the escalation point for the most difficult technical decisions and production issues
- Staff engagements based on technical complexity and individual strengths, while developing engineers into increasingly independent technical leaders
- Codify successful approaches into reusable architectures, tooling and playbooks so the team becomes more effective as it scales

## What We’re Looking For

- Significant experience in enterprise software technical delivery or forward deployed engineering roles, you have led complex deployments and written production code alongside customers
- Experience building a forward deployed engineering or solutions function, hiring the team, setting the standards and defining the delivery model
- The ability to move fluidly between strategy conversations with R&D leadership and debugging sessions with engineers
- A track record of succeeding in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where requirements evolve through direct iteration with users
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, you still build, and your technical judgement is respected by the engineers you lead
- A genuine interest in building software that enables breakthrough scientific and industrial applications

Orbital is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

## About Orbital

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Orbital Industries is an AI-first industrial company that designs and manufactures physical products using its own AI platform, starting with advanced hardware for AI data centers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Funding stage not disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Jonathan Godwin (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Manufacturing / Industrial AI / Data Center Hardware
- **Target Customers**: B2B, Enterprise (specifically data center operators)
- **Mission/Purpose**: To lead an industrial renaissance by advancing critical technologies and securing the planet, using AI to accelerate the invention and manufacture of physical products.

## Products & Services
- **Orb (AI Platform)**: An integrated AI foundation model and agentic operating system that unites domain-specific AI across material science, fluid dynamics, and hardware engineering to discover and design novel physical products. It powers all of the company’s hardware development.
- **AI Data Center Products**: High-performance, sustainable hardware for AI data centers, including direct-to-chip and two-phase liquid cooling systems using newly discovered molecular classes for high-density GPU cooling. These are sold as modular data center components.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available.
- **Key Metric**: Headcount is approximately 58 employees (as of mid-2026), with 12 active job postings indicating continued growth.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: No specific investors named, but the company highlights a relationship with **NVIDIA**. CEO Jonathan Godwin discussed the company with Jensen Huang at an NVIDIA event, and Orbital is part of the beta release for NVIDIA's Alchemist toolkit.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Rapid initial headcount growth (currently ~58 employees).
  - 12 open positions across ML engineering, mechanical engineering, finance, and talent.
  - Active in the Open Compute Project community.
  - Strong LinkedIn follower growth (+3.9% monthly).

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-Native Hardware R&D**: Unlike traditional hardware companies with large, siloed R&D departments, Orbital operates like an AI lab with small, interdisciplinary teams that use AI agents, robotic labs, and physical engineering sites.
- **Foundation Models for Physics**: Possesses world-leading AI models for advanced materials, fluid dynamics, and other physical sciences, enabling rapid iteration in simulation ("in silico") before physical prototyping.
- **Sample-Efficient AI**: Their "autoresearch" agents are designed to find correct answers in as few experiments as possible, dramatically reducing the time and cost of physical R&D, which is typically measured in months and millions of dollars per experiment.

## Strategic Focus
- **Geographic Expansion**: Scaling operations with offices already established in London (HQ), San Francisco, and Calgary. Hiring a Head of Sales for the EMEA region.
- **Broader Industrial Ambition**: While starting with data center cooling, the strategy is to apply its AI platform to other critical physical sectors, including energy, semiconductors, and general materials and machinery.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Actively hiring ML researchers and engineers to build the "next frontier of industrial AI," alongside core engineering and business roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described internally as a "talent-dense" team operating like a frontier AI lab, but with the tangible output of physical products. This appeals to those who want to see their code impact the real world.
- **Work Model**: Hybrid (typical time on-site varies by role and office location). Roles in San Francisco are in-office; London roles are hybrid.
- **Notable Perks/Engineering Culture**: Engineers work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of AI and physics. The company is small but has high-profile ambitions and partnerships (e.g., NVIDIA), offering significant ownership and impact.

## Sources
1. [orbitalindustries.com](https://www.orbitalindustries.com/)
2. [orbitalindustries.com/about](https://www.orbitalindustries.com/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/orbitalindustries](https://www.linkedin.com/company/orbitalindustries)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/orbital-industries)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/orbitalindustries](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/orbitalindustries)

## Other roles at Orbital

- [Communications Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/communications-lead-orbital-london-yzdmjh7hv672) — London, United Kingdom
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-orbital-london-j0ky5sndyk9x) — London, United Kingdom
- [Senior Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-orbital-london-hjbxs88h2eyt) — London, United Kingdom
- [Prototype Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/prototype-researcher-orbital-san-francisco-vepxqr2185j3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/test-engineer-orbital-san-francisco-n70wp6h29wkn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-orbital-london-2agc9mw9xeey) — London, United Kingdom
- [Forward Deployed Engineering Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-lead-enterpret-new-york-hep0rm6psbe3) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineering Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-lead-doppel-toronto-8er37qsycfnc) — Toronto, Canada