Forward Deployed Manufacturing Engineer

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be embedded on-site at customer factory sites — not visiting, not consulting remotely, but physically there for the stretches it takes to see a mission through. You'll use Instrumental Solve and the data it surfaces to investigate manufacturing issues, but the real work starts after the finding: knowing the specific product's architecture and build flow well enough to know what actually changed, and knowing the specific people on the floor well enough to get something done about it. Data tells you where to look; it's what you know about the product and the people that gets something fixed. Beyond the investigation work, this role gives you something harder to find: a line that's genuinely yours to run. You'll make the calls — what to fix first, how to work with the customer, what "done" looks like — without waiting on sign-off or a pre-built roadmap. You'll be the person the customer turns to and trusts, with real room to shape how things go. About Instrumental: 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 [... source excerpt omitted ...] asurable, not until it's handed off. You thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without waiting for perfect instructions. What You’ll Be Doing: Own a Mission and Deliver on It. 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 owns mission success. You can expect to work onsite and travel to customer sites approximately 25% of the time. Build Relationships with [... source excerpt omitted ...] e, you'll build real rapport with the people who determine whether a finding turns into action — learning who owns what, what they're accountable for, and how to work within that. You'll leverage those relationships to move quickly, and cement a strong, dependable reputation for yourself and Instrumental. Investigate and Drive Root Cause to Resolution. You'll dig into ambiguous manufacturing questions, using your knowledge of the product's build flow alongside production and test data to form hypotheses and land on validated findings. You won't stop at the finding — you'll drive the corrective action through until it actually changes yield, throughput, or time-to-market. Shap