---
title: 'Forward-Deployed Manufacturing Engineer at Instrumental, Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-manufacturing-engineer-instrumental-inc-dallas-pjqx4wcqdj5q'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Forward-Deployed Manufacturing Engineer at Instrumental, Inc.

- **Company:** Instrumental, Inc.
- **Location:** Dallas, TX
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/instrumental-inc-/am9icG9zdDqZeUWbjCTMpcz5yE6uvgHo

## Job description

Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.

Instrumental is seeking a versatile Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our tight-knit, high-performance Customer Experience team. This unique role will blend your hands-on experience in electronics manufacturing environments with our cutting-edge AI technology to deliver rapid and impactful results to our customers around the world. You’ll be involved in executing equipment deployments into complex electronics manufacturing lines, training Instrumental algorithms, leveraging our software to accelerate value delivery, and building critical relationships with our customers and their manufacturing partners. You’ll be working with Instrumental’s fastest-growing customers and delivering against core company missions.

This is a great opportunity for someone passionate about improving electronics manufacturing and who loves frequent travel to factories in North America and around the world. The ideal candidate is multi-faceted, technically savvy, organized, and deeply customer-oriented.

What You’ll Be Doing:

- Own a Mission and Deliver on It. In this role, you’ll travel to customer factory sites, primarily in North America, with a specific, company-critical mission. Common missions may include setting up and integrating physical equipment and accelerating customer “time to value” by hand-tuning Instrumental algorithms and software. You’ll have support from our global team, but you’ll be the engineer on the ground who will own mission success.
- Build Relationships with Customer and Factory Stakeholders. While onsite, you’ll endeavor to understand and build rapport with the various stakeholders who are critical to Instrumental’s success and pave the way for further adoption. You’ll leverage these relationships to complete your missions quickly and effectively. You’ll cement a strong technical and dependable reputation for yourself and Instrumental at large.
- Leverage Instrumental’s Software to Drive Value. You’ll quickly become an expert in Instrumental’s software and technology, including many non-customer-facing functionalities. This will enable you to quickly identify how to get the most performance out of the system – whether that’s by making a physical tweak in the real-world, adding training labels, or replicating customer tests. You’ll use your engineer’s understanding of how our customer derive value to rapidly achieve results.

What You Have:

- Experience getting things done in electronics factories. 3+ years of professional experience in electronics manufacturing doing engineering or operations – either on the “brand” or EMS side. You understand factory environments, processes, and politics and can leverage that expertise to get things done quickly.
- Love the factory floor more than an office. This role requires frequent travel to customer factory sites, primarily in North America. During peak periods, travel ratio may be as high as 80% of the time – and may include transiting in evenings and on weekends.
- Demonstrated ability to complete your mission. You can share countless stories of mission ownership and completion, where you were able to deliver despite unforeseen or challenging circumstances. You love the idea of applying your diverse engineering and operations skillsets to critical company missions.
- Excellent written and spoken English + ideally Mandarin communication. This role will require rapid and effective communication with a variety of global stakeholders, representing Instrumental with our more important customers. We’re looking for someone who enjoys meeting and interacting with people – this is a front-line role. We will prioritize bilingual English/Mandarin speakers.

You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description.

Instrumental offers competitive, location-based compensation. The following is a representative annual base salary range: $116,500-$158,000. This job is also eligible for variable compensation, and the job title at hire will be "Field Deployed Engineer".

Job leveling and salary opportunity are evaluated through our interview process—we review each applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Instrumental’s benefits include: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Parental Leave.

At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.

## About Instrumental, Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Instrumental provides a Manufacturing Engineering Control Platform that uses AI and data to help electronics companies optimize production, reduce waste, and accelerate new product introductions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2014
- **Founders**: Anna-Katrina Shedletsky (CEO) and Samuel Weiss (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Manufacturing Technology (Hardware + Software + AI), Industrial IoT, Electronics Manufacturing
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise; electronics brands and contract manufacturers producing complex consumer and mission-critical electronics.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To eliminate $8 trillion in manufacturing waste by providing core infrastructure that empowers engineering and operations teams to design, execute, and operate with world-class efficiency [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/company/).

## Products & Services
- **Manufacturing Acceleration Platform**: A cloud-based platform that captures inspection, test, and process signals across factory lines, turning them into an engineering dataset for analysis. Key capabilities include:
    - **Discovery-Driven Inspection**: Identifies previously unknown failure modes early in production before they impact yield.
    - **Production Controls**: Deploys tests to intercept known failures and synchronize inspection standards across factories.
    - **Accelerated Failure Analysis**: Uses AI to eliminate potential root causes in minutes, saving up to 90% of time per analysis.
    - **Factory Signal Capture**: Connects data from multiple factories into a single, shared engineering dataset.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$80.3M** across 5 rounds [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.).
    - Seed (2015): $2.8M led by Root Ventures, First Round Capital.
    - Series A (2017): $7.5M led by Root Ventures, Eclipse.
    - Series B (2020): $20M led by Canaan Partners.
    - Series C (2022): $50M led by BAM Elevate.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: BAM Elevate, Canaan Partners, Root Ventures, First Round Capital, Eclipse.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - **Headcount**: 70 employees (+10.5% YoY) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.).
    - **Customer Wins**: Serves major brands like **NVIDIA** (sped up final assembly by 14 days), **Meta** (saved 900+ engineering weeks annually across 7 programs), and **Toast** (achieved 5.3X ROI) [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/).
    - **Active Hiring**: 22 open positions as of the latest data [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Domain Expertise**: Founded by ex-Apple product design engineers who experienced the manufacturing waste problem firsthand, giving them unique insight and credibility [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/company/).
- **Proven ROI**: Platform delivers measurable, large-scale results for top-tier global brands (e.g., 5.3X ROI, saving hundreds of engineering weeks).
- **First-of-its-Kind Platform**: Instrumental’s platform is described as the "world’s first Manufacturing Engineering Control Platform," combining AI with factory-floor signals in a way that hasn't been done before [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/company/).
- **Strong Customer Base**: Counts industry leaders like Axon, Bose, Cisco, Meta, SolarEdge, and ChargePoint as customers [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.).

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to capture more factory signals, deepening AI capabilities for predictive and prescriptive analytics, and expanding its customer base within the complex electronics manufacturing industry.
- **Direction for growth**: Continuing to build the "engineering system for manufacturing" to standardize production knowledge, enable faster scaling, and improve collaboration across global factory networks [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven**: The company is tackling a massive, tangible problem ($8T in waste) with a clear goal to cut it in half. Employees can see the direct impact of their work on global manufacturing efficiency.
- **Culture**: Described as "collaborative, passionate, transparent, and impact-driven." Core values include "Play to Win" and "Default to Action," with a focus on forming authentic connections and celebrating wins [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/life-at-instrumental/).
- **Global & Distributed Team**: Offices in Palo Alto, CA and Shenzhen, China. The team works closely across locations, with a strong Slack culture and weekly All-Hands lunches [instrumental.com](https://instrumental.com/careers/).
- **Strong Talent Pool**: Team members come from top-tier companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Foxconn, and Fictiv, indicating a high-caliber peer group [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.).
- **Technical Challenges**: Engineers work on a unique blend of hardware, software, and AI problems at the intersection of physical product design and digital data platforms.

## Sources
1. [Instrumental Company Page](https://instrumental.com/company/)
2. [Instrumental Product Page](https://instrumental.com/)
3. [Instrumental Careers Page](https://instrumental.com/careers/)
4. [Instrumental Life Page](https://instrumental.com/life-at-instrumental/)
5. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/instrumental-inc.)

## Other roles at Instrumental, Inc.

- [Principal Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-solutions-architect-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-x7x5n7dhzbgx) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-rzgc6dd10n8w) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Lead Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-recruiter-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-hb3egtp7gmwn) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Forward Deployed Manufacturing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-manufacturing-engineer-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-qkkp0neq12jy) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-site-reliability-engineer-sre-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-awbkwm97rjfg) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Forward-Deployed Manufacturing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-manufacturing-engineer-instrumental-inc-cincinnati-h127t233xsgp) — Cincinnati, OH
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- [Senior Solutions Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-solutions-design-engineer-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-mb1v4pa7e7ty) — Palo Alto, CA
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- [Solutions Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-design-engineer-instrumental-inc-palo-alto-qn2q7h440tzb) — Palo Alto, CA