Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: NYC Headquarters (Hybrid), with occasional travel to customer sites

Viam is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as the technical point of contact for strategic customers. This role blends deep engineering expertise with post-sales execution, customer strategy, and consultative problem-solving. You’ll be a trusted advisor to named accounts; building relationships, guiding implementations, and ensuring long-term success on the Viam platform.

We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of engineering, product thinking, and customer engagement; someone who’s excited to bring modern software practices to new industries, and who can turn ambiguity into traction.

What you’ll do:

• Act as the technical lead for select enterprise accounts; guiding implementation, onboarding, integration, and customer success
• Work closely with engineering teams at client companies to ensure adoption of Viam’s SDKs, APIs, and tools
• Partner with Sales, Product, and Engineering to identify new areas of value and expand our footprint within the customer organization
• Solve open-ended technical challenges in real-time, either hands-on or by finding the right internal resource
• Translate unclear customer needs into clear technical next steps; act as the connective tissue across stakeholders
• Communicate proactively, organize information clearly, and help reduce friction in cross-functional and customer conversations
• Represent the voice of the customer internally; sharing feedback, surfacing blockers, and advocating for roadmap priorities

About you:

• You’re a self-starter with strong software engineering fundamentals and excellent communication skills
• You’ve played a post-sales or customer-facing engineering role in the past (Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Strategic Deployments, etc.)
• You enjoy solving real customer problems, not just building features
• You know how to prioritize in fast-moving situations, and can balance short-term needs with long-term goals
• You write and debug code comfortably (Python, Go, JavaScript, or similar)
• You’re organized and resourceful – you can keep track of multiple conversations, workstreams, and stakeholders
• You’ve supported enterprise customers and understand the dynamics of large accounts

Nice to have:

• Experience building hardware solutions
• Experience with systems integration, SDKs, distributed systems, or edge/cloud architectures
• Background in computer vision, ML tooling, or signal processing
• Familiarity with modern tools and workflows for devops, CI/CD, observability, or infrastructure
• Exposure to technical sales cycles or go-to-market collaboration
• Prior experience in a startup, consulting firm, or platform company